The linearity of time is quite the thing. As the thready tail of time grows the loom ahead gets thinner and laxer. The inexorable consolation we all seek from history plays out on some inward screen within, evoking thoughts and invoking ideas.
One such day passed and this whole macabre episode in the history of man called the pandemic alighted on my shoulders, a burst of darkness, burdening the soul, a bit. The wretched inconstant light flickered and seemed to fade, and the dark clouds hovered over with their real bent of a cold hard rain.
The phantasmagoric vision played out within, with sparks and glows and pain and sorrow and the forsaken glory of once happy togetherness. What was this beast that has so marched up against us and rendered us so passive that we have closed our doors to let it pass us by without tarnishing our, what remains of our inner, dignity?
The term loss or Gain of Function looms high in this movie. Someone far away, somewhere, as the lore is told, did something that took away our liberty and freedom. That function gained power and rained pellets of fear and harm upon us. That gain spread like wildfire across the parched landscape to make the function more aggressive. It moved pieces together one pipette at a time, that microscopically enabled jump, would never happen by itself, what made the virus jump into the well-spring of willing receptors in the interior human cells. While the pangolins paraded their armadillo-like scales and bats flew, neither had the trace of the precise demon. None of the glycoprotein related “HxNx” modifications gained via the zoonotic tree ever showed up on the visage of this new conqueror. It was quite the jump from the 144 other versions to this one. Almost as if a computer code had rewritten the entire genome in one fell swoop. Quite a feat for the maternally endowed Nature.
But what of this fear? The daily beast of reporting negativity and the daily victors of fame conjoined at the hip spelled mountains of words, spilling nightmares into the children, their parents and their parents, parents. Soon the world had collapsed into a singular motif of expression. As the river of sanity ran dry, the volcanoes of fear erupted all over and more chasms of fear ensued.
The tiny monster no bigger than 0.5% the thickness of hair curled into, cozied up with its calling card and entered the human element. It brought within it a code to replicate. And replicate, it did, as all such monsters do. Theirs, within them, is the written code to propagate, as with all species on this green-blue orb. And survive and propagate this viral army of a trillion combatants did, finding more than 2 billion humans to find a haven within. But not all became its calling card. Most instantly revolted and rebuked and rejected the entry and continued on their journey of life. A few weakened and then grew strong again to fight again. And unfortunately, some, the weaker and more infirmed succumbed to the tiny beast. But the latter was not its intent. To kill means also to die for without the host, there is no propagability. So, in facing such challenges and not allowing the human host to die, the beast changed its own circuitry to prevent harm. Illness it did cause, but killing the host became lesser and lesser. Those infected developed a robust defense against the virus. They walked out through a sea of these tiny wind-blown monsters and never felt a pinch on skin or a prick of cold within. They just carried on. The more of these healthy ones grew the firewall the more the tiny beast was forced into submission.
At long last, with the brilliant minds scattering their sunshine, a remarkable human achievement stole the show. This then combined with the naturally infected would be the great wall to hold back the monster. But as challenges go, the wall became the prison and the mind poisoned with fear grew to adapt within the wall and not leap out into the unknown for adventure. The blandness of the human mind began replicating faster than the desire to have the adventure. More and more walls started to get built. Each enterprise with its own sets of rules and desires purchased the ink to write the resolve to protect from an element that nature did not call for or ask. Because nature has a way with its own set of rules. Yet man, in his gloried self-contained mind given to flights of fancy, created a larger maze around himself. The maze grew as the mind conjured and soon everything nature had bestowed as Grace on man became a piece of vestige rather than an altar to behold. Humans harkened the yesteryears where they had successfully thwarted beasts of equal or worse measure. They had culled Polio, destroyed Measles, Mumps and Rubella and gained a solid defense against ChickenPox amongst many others. Yet this tiny monster with its potential of that gain of function was not easily fooled. It had its own miserable code of harm written within.
While confinement was the key to the magic of spread, that is the thread that learned philosophers of medical principles seem to agree in contradistinction to the reality that open air was the damper on this tiny monster’s parade. In this action some prospered while the majority faded into oblivion. Fear threatened and barriers grew even when the barriers were akin to chain link fences to ward off mosquitoes. People feared the invisible and soon began to fear each other more. Logic and reason both time-honored handmaidens to common sense were relegated to ignorance, and a new branch of science with nary a fact of support arose to overwhelm the “intellectual minds.”
The small vials and their contents poured out through the tiny nozzles and became the very art of safety and security. Irrespective of any previous encounters with the tiny beast, all were asked to partake in the glory of this human invention. And humanity lined up in droves from dawn to dusk. Happily, the candy of health was delivered and happily it was consumed.
The vials were meant to confer 95 of 100 people with the protection they sought, at least that was what was told to them. The number it appears was a relative risk reduction based on the numbers of people who had undergone the initial trials. For instance, if 30 people in one group of 100 have an effect and 35 of 100 in the placebo group, then the absolute risk reduction is (5 of 200) 2.5% but the relative risk reduction is 30/35*100 or 85.7%. And going further into the weeds of this thinking there are many rabbit holes where caterpillars and red queens exist. I tripped into one of those. “Who goes there!” a deep melodic voice echoed as I stepped quietly into the dark cave beneath the roots of an oak tree. Much goes on in these dark chambers of dirt and roots and insects and animals that lurk within. Another thought emerged as I stepped below a low-lying cavern where suddenly stalagmites appeared in an otherwise brownish dark gloom. What about the past experiences? What about the reams of paper, with mountains of data from the past experiences? Why not ask for some of that and compare with what we have here? Indeed, let us do some of that. Shall we?
A pen and paper appeared as if by magic and it began writing formulas. One such formula appeared as all others faded, “0.55 x 0.87 = 0.4785” Hmm… what could that mean? And before the full impact of that statement was at hand, the idea froze into semi permanence. It was the RR 55% efficacy of the Flu vaccine (the prior) and the 87% RR efficacy of the current panacea when combined together, it yielded a magisterial number of 47.85% efficacy! That was it? The knock on my head with the falling acorn awakened me to a bright sunny blue day with clusters of white and grey clouds threatening in the foreground.
The luster seems lost, no matter how much we polish this paradigm. It seems that the firewall of happiness remains in the robustness of nature’s own remedy for most and the artificially acquired one for those most vulnerable to falling ill to this monster. The rest can and should be allowed to rejoice in the captivity of their youth and health, perhaps. But then this is a dream within a dream that I write about. A flight of fancy all encompassed within the few moments of a blacked-out slumber.
And perhaps this coruscating wilderness of thought within the ramparts of our tortured minds is the illume we have wished for in our darkest of hours and perhaps that is the way it will come to be, or not. The force is strong as a jedi would feel, yet the dark forces too must be reckoned with in a fight. And strength is a relative measure.
But for the harm that might accrue accidentally, via complications between the merger of the actual malady, the artifice of the colorless liquid and the tortured unprocessed metrics gathered in haste, we should remain vigilant. Needless to say, there is always some draw down from speculations and this will also be part of the tale.
Perhaps a moment of silent self-reflection is upon us. We must use it to think, reason and understand the wisdom within us and the chaos that reigns outside.
