Above: Photo by Milkos/DepositPhotos.com

BitDepth#1334 for December  27,  2021

Three weeks ago I had a long talk with someone about vaccination. It took two days, with a booster last week.

My electrician is an absolute professional, careful, and conscientious with his work.

On the first day of working on a project, a mention of vaccination led him to offer a quietly impassioned rejection of the idea of the jab.

I try not to be an evangelist in matters that align with personal beliefs, declining to duel over intractable matters like religion and politics.

The world is big enough and diverse enough for deeply-held beliefs to coexist.

Except when the world isn’t big enough and opinion diversity is levelled by a virus that cares nothing about our differences or beliefs, storming ahead with a determination to replicate and spread until it touches everyone, far too many of them mortally.

There are some concepts underlying vaccines, and infection vectors that are difficult to understand, let alone explain.

Viral load is one. By now, we have all probably been exposed to some Covid-19. Time, spread and activity make that almost certain.

How much virus we are exposed to and how well our bodies respond to it makes a critical difference in the sharply sliding scale of infection, symptoms, level of hospitalisation and potential mortality.

Over that two-hour, languid chat, I explained what I knew of the Covid-19 vaccine, the conversation rolling back and forth agreeably and apparently with little effect.

After my failed attempt to persuade one person to be vaccinated, I thought about a story I encountered on Quora, where I’d been exploring the mechanics of war.

Bombers in WWII were being shot down in alarming numbers on missions to Germany, so British command began inspecting the aircraft returning from missions, mapping bullet holes.

The plan was to fortify the areas where the holes were most prevalent until a Hungarian-Jewish refugee scientist, Abraham Wald, pointed out that the exact opposite was needed.

The maps of damage that had been so carefully prepared actually identified all the places a bomber could be hit and return home. What needed to be armoured was everything else, an analysis that became known as survivor bias.
(You can find the whole story in the book, Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed.)

That story is a reminder that when everyone is looking at the same data from the same perspective, the groupthink can smother the obvious.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the effort to persuade citizens to take a Covid-19 vaccine isn’t working.

Recent urgings and threats to the public to be vaccinated have only led to an uptick in booster shots being administered, with first vaccinations remaining flatlined.

The biggest red flag of all isn’t the saturation of the parallel health care system, it the end of mortuary space. This country no longer has the capacity to store its dead before a funeral.

Arguing about science is useless when so much of the resistance is rooted in faith.
In 1796, the first vaccine was pus from an animal’s cowpox blister which proved that mild exposure to a lesser illness could teach the human body to more effectively respond to the more deadly smallpox virus.

The response to the more advanced science of vaccination of 2020 is rooted in fear and doubt.

It also flies in the face of what we expect a vaccine to do, given our learned experience with the mature prophylactics available for smallpox, measles and yellow fever, which promise a shield from illness.

To understand covid19 as a living thing, replicating, adapting and constantly seeking safe harbour is difficult, but that is what it does, to our great expense.

There has been little explanation of the background of research that began with SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, which triggered serious scientific investigation into coronaviruses that attacked the respiratory system.

In 2019, scientists didn’t know anything about covid, but they had a background of research in viruses like it.

What’s necessary now is an uncommon level of empathy – something that governments and state agencies don’t tend to excel at providing – to understand what’s simmering in the minds of more than 40 percent of the TT population.

To do that, we need more people looking at the data that’s driving government’s decisions, because it’s clear that the paternal ‘your Government knows best’ position isn’t working at all.

Threatening people’s jobs if they don’t take ‘Satan’s juice’ isn’t going to work, though there is a growing trend of quiet but insistent urging that’s becoming more prevalent in the gig economy, as customers begin to add vaccination status to their criteria for choosing a vendor.

The challenge is to translate the deep science that created the vaccines into a local lay understanding of medication that values unprescribed, garden-harvested remedies.
The response must be a patient, informed and committed effort at disassembling misunderstandings and managing apprehensions about the Covid-19 vaccine.

It doesn’t help that the state is so keen to control the information it gathers and to keep the media at a distance.

Starving journalists of access and hard data, while limiting access to the reality of covid treatment and its mortal outcomes, eliminates first-hand reporting and reduces journalism to teasing apart PR spin and varnished facts.

Impenetrable charts flit across the screen at virtual presentations only to disappear forever.

Difficult questions are either glossed over or remain quietly unanswered. Hard data about Covid-19 has apparently become a nuisance to the state.

Into that void spills an internet’s worth of disinformation, feeding an array of belief systems and interlocking arguments that can only be met by conversations between respected peers, not commands from podiums.

It may be easier to bouf people, threaten their pay packets and dismiss the hesitant as a lost cause, but that isn’t what governance is supposed to be about.

To govern a country and specifically to govern a country in a pandemic, is to hear with is being said, tailor a response that urges the required behaviour and never give up on the fundamental premise of leadership, guiding those in your charge toward a better day.