Sketchbook/Writing

The Covid Trap

February 9, 2022 May 8, 2023

As I am mentally preparing myself to finally meet all of you, my friends, for that pint we’ve been talking about for two years, I’m a little nervous. So to break the ice, I’ve decided to hereby disclose and declare the following:

I will not disclose my vaccine status to you, including whether I have been boostered. Feel free to unfriend me for this outrageous behaviour. What I will disclose and declare however, is that we have finally lost the plot. Us:

Lefties, Liberals, Progressives.

We’ve always been a rather strange tribe, but Covid has turned us into a tribe of self-destructive morons. Now, deadly pathogens have the tendency to frighten us humans, and when we’re frightened, we do some pretty weird things. But two years into this, it’s time to wake up. For us – Lefties, Liberals, Progressives – this means to wake up to a scientific fact:

We are humans.

We might be morally superior to our political opponents, but we are not superior in intelligence or have more capacity for independent thought.
The harsh reality, my friends, is that we are the Worst Lemmings of ‘Em All. And that’s why Covid got us trapped.

So how did we get here? Let’s recap:

In early 2020, we started hearing stories of a strange virus in a place we’d never heard of, far, far away. For most of us, the only nuisance seemed that we couldn’t book our next holiday in that general region of the world. Six weeks later, we were running around like a bunch of headless chicken.

But another six weeks later, something strange had happened. We all had turned into experts. Glued to our communications devices, we would take in data, scientific facts, and anecdotal information as it unfolded in real-time, only to educate our friends about it five minutes later. Socially distanced and remotely of course. When stories emerged of people who had tested positive again within a short time, it sparked fears that covid may not induce immunity at all. The whole episode has been largely forgotten, but it is worth reminding ourselves of it today:

We actually contemplated a world with a respiratory virus that doesn’t induce immunity. And in response, we were going to lock ourselves in until science had developed a vaccine for a virus that doesn’t induce immunity.

I’m not mocking the scientists who investigated this absurd idea. We asked them to do so, and they mostly considered it highly improbable. But it was the moment, when us amateurs started to get involved in issues we don’t understand. The mess we’re in today, is the result.

Some viruses don’t induce immunity indeed, most famously HIV. Science has failed to develop a vaccine for it in 40 years. Luckily, SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be very different . But today we’ve gone to the other extreme, acting as if we could vaxx this virus away like the measles. And so our poor understanding of science has made us overzealous in promoting these vaccines, while acting in utter intolerance to the slightest skepticism about them. Our blind support, over the last few months, to indiscriminately boost the entire adult population, is that really based on good science? Or dare I detect a familiar monster to rear its ugly head once again:

Capitalist Consumer Society, or in other words our insatiable appetite to consume vast amounts of resources just because we can!

Yes, real-world data might say it is safe to vaccinate children. But is it really necessary? And is it fair? While we’re vaccinating healthy 6 year olds and have boostered the entire western world, Africa has gone largely unvaccinated through the pandemic. Now, that we can finally see light at the end of the tunnel, we demand to vaccinate the world. Why? To soothe our guilty conscience?

Closer to home, we obsess about a 34 year old tennis player, who doesn’t want to be vaccinated. For what practical purpose? In the UK, there are 127,515 unvaccinated NHS and domiciliary care staff in registered settings. Shouldn’t we worry about those people instead? And by the way, who are they? Does the NHS employ 127,515 New-Age Hippie, Anti-Vaxx, QAnon Supporting Ultra-rightwing, Maskless White Male Covid Deniers? Hard to say. It’s much easier to vilify a Serbian nationalist, who stubbornly refuses to get vaccinated against a virus he recovered from three weeks earlier. And when he’s put in a detention centre, we celebrate because it shows that patience with vaccine-sceptics is wearing thin.

Have we lost the plot?

Our opponents are making pragmatic decisions and have no problems adapting their strategy in order to achieve their aims and objectives. In the meantime, we are locked into absurd arguments, which have no practical benefit whatsoever. In the process, all we usually do is end up shooting ourselves in the foot. But despite profusely bleeding from both feet, we’re still busy reloading the gun.

Take Brexit for example. We didn’t loose that because of the evil rightwing media. We lost it because our campaign was utterly pathetic. It lacked any positive vision, and we were completely unable to dismantle the buffoon at the helm of the opposing camp. Desperately trying to expose his racism, we started foaming from the mouth when he mocked Obama. But when he mocked Britain’s European neighbours, nobody stood up to him. But I guess real democracy between people who don’t even speak proper English is indeed just a ridiculous idea.

Fast forward 6 years and this buffoon is leading the country. And while we are trying our best to bring him down over partygate, we’re actually in the process of handing him another victory. He is about to triumph over us, and declare Great Britain the first country in the world to have defeated this virus. I’m sure SARS-CoV-2 is getting ready for unconditional surrender to this reincarnation of Winston Churchill.

Ok, so it looks like we’ve shot ourselves in the foot, once again, but do we really need to reload the gun?

The UK government made terrible decisions in this pandemic, some of them so bad, they made the country the laughing stock of the world. But to open up society in the summer of 2021 was not one of them. It would have been wise of us not to scream as loud as we did in our opposition to that.

But we couldn’t help it. Frustrated by our inability to bring down the buffoon, all we had was a religious obsession with following science. But the truth is, we don’t really understand this science. Ironically, we didn’t need to. No one should have ever required a statistical model from Imperial College to tell us that something had to be done in March 2020. All that was needed was common sense.

The same was true for the summer of 2021. Sadly, by then the last traces of common sense had disappeared from our tribe. No, there was no summer wave in the UK, which peaked at 10,000 hospitalisations a day. And no, Omicron did not peak at 5,000 daily deaths either. But instead of doing the human thing and admit that we got some things wrong, we are still desperately trying to adapt the narrative, so we can insist that we were right all along.

But there is another problem: we don’t see each other any more for that beer, a cuppa in the office kitchen, or whatever beverages we used to share with each other casually. Over the last two years, we’ve retreated even more into our tribes than before, formed new sub-tribes and to this day haven’t come out of our extended support bubbles. In the process, we’ve created even more bizarre images not only of the other tribes, but also of each other. It’s as if we’ve turned society into some kind of WhatsApp argument that has gone horribly wrong, and nobody knows how to stop it. If we continue like this, we’ll really end up killing each other when we finally come out of hiding.

So let me start with myself: I am sorry if what I said offends you, or if you think I am wrong. I am just trying to make sense of it all, without real understanding, let alone scientific knowlegde. But I am not driven by anti-science aggression or have lost empathy for my fellow human beings; I have not defected to some evil enemy tribe; and I am not about to conspire against you, and what is right and best for our society.

I am just a human being and as such can’t take it any more! This is destroying me, and I feel it’s destroying us.

I thought we are the tribe that promotes things such as socialism? Yet we continue to kick and scream, demanding ever more social distancing. Didn’t we fight for tolerance and diversity? Now this tribe demands my friends to disclose their medical history! Where is the heart in this cohort, as we divide into sub-cohorts on the basis of with or without? My soul (1,081 ± 139.9 BAU/mL (P = 0.009) binding antibody units) is burning [95% confidence interval 60% – 80%]! Intrinsic severity = 1 – HR [1-VE(δέλτα)], with intolerable discrimination of dead cells, while anti-Human IgG−peroxidase antibody conjugate at AZ 2+weeks post-dose 2 (PD2) against the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein. Vaccine states with hazard ratios of 1.86 (95%CI: 1.67-2.08) in the variance-covariance matrix, producing a 5.41 (95% CI: 4.87-6.00) fold higher relative risk of reinfection. Using the probability of death distribution, the expected number of deaths d_t,m , on a given day t, for country, m, is given by the following discrete sum: