Just Take It!

 

It was just over two years ago that I boiled over, irritated by what anti-vaxxers were doing to the children of the world. In that year, I learned that 207,000 people had died of measles whilst, during that same period, less than 100 people died of polio. The contrast makes you want to weep.

What was so special about polio? Nothing. It was, simply, that the campaign to immunize against it was effective, as it was supposed to be. Despite the antics of groups like the Taliban and Boko Haram, most at-risk children received their anti-polio immunization, thereby avoiding premature death and, for those who did not die, the long-term disabling effects of the infection.

Anti-vaxxers pick their target well. The MMR (the measles, mumps rubella) vaccine complex has a certain cachet that makes it a favoured subject among the chattering classes whilst, for polio, its appalling grotesqueness disqualifies it for discussion in decent society.

When I wrote that blog in 2019, no one had any idea that in 2020-2021 (and perhaps beyond) the world would have become a very scary place, gasping for survival against an existential threat. Well, not everyone. Some people, just a few, perhaps, were paying attention. They probably lost hours or even days, of sleep in their bid to warn us that a big one was on its way, an assessment that was based on common-sense calculations and, of course, historical precedence. In the decade before, we had had to face the challenges of by H1N1, SARS, MERS, and Ebola, all of which now seem, in retrospect, mere trial runs for this, this near-apocalypse.

Of course, we love apocalypses. But only as entertainments in their filmic versions. Nevertheless, they serve as teachable moments. They tell us that apocalypses transpire when the leader, usually a ‘big man’, puffed up by self-importance, considers himself the master of the universe and ignores all warnings until, too late, the world around him tumbles into chaos and drags the rest of us with him into the morass.

Our situation today is frightening, and indeed very different from that during 2019. Then, by and large, we were able to distinguish between truth and lies, between fact and fiction. Between what is good for the public on the one hand and what is self-aggrandizement on the other. Yes, indeed, we could. But, since 2019 and even before, the public mood changed, especially in countries which count themselves advanced, but where events like the chaos surrounding Brexit and Donald Trump’s sustained assault on decency and civility have confused and unhinged the world.

But in 20/21, two major pathologies threaten us. One is biological. The other, a crisis of confidence in ourselves. The biological one is easy enough to understand, although the other one crosses the line and tramples all over the medical and science territory in a raucous debate about the nature of COVID-19, incorporating peculiar notions such as that the virus is a construct deliberately fabricated and released into the world to unsettle adversaries. Your classic conspiracy theory with all the bells and whistles and just another facet of the present-day conflation of fact and fiction. However, just consider: 205,848,576 people, worldwide, have been infected by Covid-19, and over 4 million have died from it in wave after wave. These figures are probably under-estimates, as governments, notoriously, massage their country’s statistics so as to look good and con their tribal followers.

But in whatever way you slice and dice them, the figures could, unquestionably, be much, much better if vaccines, now available, were taken up by the majority of the population when offered. But resistance, or to be more woke, ‘hesitancy’, hampers the project.

“Just take the blasted thing”, I say.

Tell Fren Tru