Take a Break in the Covid Storm: a Birds-Eye View
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” ― Socrates.
The Problem of Expertise
It would seem that we as a society are conditioned to trust the experts. Trust the doctors, trust the teachers, trust the police, trust the government. It would also seem as though we are effectively trained not to ask questions or challenge authority or experts and just do what we are told, especially if you didn’t get a decent science education. Because what a science education teaches you, above all else, is to ask questions and take nobody’s word for it. If there is one thing that is clear in the current crisis, it’s that we’re all becoming better scientists.
We live in a world that seems rife with greed and corruption, all the good in the world not withstanding. ‘Big Pharma’ is one of the largest contributors to politicians around the world, and that in itself scares the life out of otherwise sane individuals. Add to that the dumbed-down messaging and bungling of public safety measures, and for some it seems that the so-called mainstream media is indistinguishable from a propaganda arm of the government.
Disambiguating Fact from Fiction
Biases in our reasoning and our evidence collection can make it very hard to separate fact from fiction and reach a consensus.
If people had some of the ingredients of vaccines put into their food, and told what they are, would they eat them? monkey brain, foetus cells, thimersol, etc. Formaldehyde is another ingredient added to some vaccines. It’s designed to ‘irritate’ the point of injection to initiate the immune response. On the other hand, formaldehyde is also naturally occurring in the body and is critical to the metabolic process (i.e. mitochondrial conversion of oxygen into sugars within our cells).
If you add together all the formaldehyde in the twenty five or so vaccines in the US childhood vaccination schedule, it is about the same as a small banana. Bananas are also slightly radioactive, as they contain an unstable isotope of potassium. At the same time, there are less antigens in those twenty five vaccines combined than in a single shot of the MMR vaccine that your mum might have taken in 1971.
As the saying goes, it’s the dosage that makes the poison.
As you may know, people can also die from Dihydrogen Monoxide poisoning — aka, drinking too much water. Dihydrogen Monoxide is what scientists in the 1900s used to call Hydrogen Dioxide — H2O — before nomenclature was updated. Table Salt, aka Sodium Chloride, is made of an explosive metal and a corrosive gas. Thimerosal is a similar, stable amalgam (which, as it happens, passes out of the body quickly). It also hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines for 20 years (as a precaution, see below).
What’s going on?
As a thought experiment, consider the following ‘suspicious narrative’. One of the major causes of increases in age-related cancers is that people are living on average twice as long as they did 100 years ago. At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry worldwide has been profiting off disease and ill-health over all of this time. Since people are more likely to suffer disease and ill-health later in life, we should consider the possibility that the pharmaceutical industry has been deliberately extending our lives over the last 100 years precisely in order to further exploit us for profit when we become unwell. I think three key factors are overlapping here:
1. the fight or flight dilemma: fear of hidden agency instinctively subverts our reasoning and inspires precaution — aka, the precautionary principle.
2. the scientific challenge: disambiguating correlation from causation is hard and requires great precision.
3. Darwin’s insight: there is adaptive competition to fill evolutionary niches: for example, overpopulation by rabbits makes a lot of dinner for foxes.
Everyone is doing 1. because we are all human animals needing to survive and thrive. We are all also doing 2. because making predictive models for survival is built into us. But it really does help to have a formal training in it. However, many people are not even aware of 3. or at least, just how universally it applies. This adaptive, game-theoretic back-and-forth, is playing out across the entire evolutionary timeline, from the dawn of life and throughout all human activity to the present day.
What I suspect is going on in the vaccine debate is a vexatious overlap between the unseen evolutionary dynamics on the one hand, and our adaptive fear of hidden agency on the other. It’s easy to see Bill Gates as the fox, for example. But it’s next to impossible to decipher that the ‘global controlling elite’ are, like all of us, individual loci of competitive/adaptive influences across every domain of human culture and life.
The Existential Dilemma
As Shakespeare might say, to take the vaccine or not to take the vaccine? What many of us now face is a profound dilemma of figuring out what our own precautionary instinct is saying. Is it wait and see? Or take it now — as a precaution — in case later is too late?
Perhaps we should open the borders and let nature run it’s course. Yes, perhaps more people would then die from Covid. But many, including our Elders were going to die sooner or later anyway (emphasis intentional).
Nothing brings into sharp relief the personal, ethical and societal dilemmas we face than the Covid pandemic.
A Bird’s Eye View
Taking a middle path — a bird’s eye view of this perfect storm, if you will — the following paper offers many useful and insightful perspectives. It covers seven decades of research into misinformation and disinformation, but please don’t judge the paper by it’s title.. It’s not trying to persuade you of anything directly in relation to the vaccine and Covid lockdown measures. That, we still have to figure out for ourselves. But I trust that many people on both sides might find much to agree with — perhaps even all of it. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100612451018
In short, sometimes there’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing — and reality bites — so beware. But trust that sometimes it’s opportunity knocking at the door. Learning to tell the difference is the hard part.
🙏🌍
