Perspective and Astonishment
By: Alon Michael
Tags: Hope, Vaccines, Fear, Perspective, Knowledge

“The Triumph of Death,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Similar to all controversies, I must accept the potential backlash that this piece will create. While countries around the world have started to vaccinate people by the hundreds of thousands and while hope is, however cautiously, appearing, there are still many people around the world who are against these vaccines. People who are claiming that the vaccines and the companies responsible for their development are all part of a big government conspiracy.

Other people just refuse to trust the science behind these vaccines, demanding their leaders to prove the vaccines are safe by being vaccinated first. While yet still others hate the thought that while they will receive a life saving remedy, someone will get rich from that.

I acknowledge the right people have to their own opinions and so I accept the fact that this sentimental topic will create some different reactions. We must, however, feel free to challenge ourselves with controversial ideas, concepts, and beliefs. Unchallenged, religion would rule the world forever. Unchallenged, racial theories would still be the ‘science of the day’. Unchallenged, 1943’s Germany would still be burning people, if there was anyone left.

So, please accept the following words as a challenge practice. If you keep your views after reading it, it only means that your constitute in regard to your ideas is strong and that’s a good thing. If you find these views, your ideas, challenged and that doubt starts to creep in — that’s wonderful! It means that there is an opportunity for a change. Life is change, and change is always welcome.

The reason I felt obliged to write about this topic is simple, the COVID-19, its psychological implications and their outcome is the ultimate test of our times. Never before in the past century has the world, the whole world, was confronted with such a chaotic situation. Much beyond any immediate implication of the nature of the pandemic itself, another kind of nature fueled that chaos. That is, human nature.

Our human nature is a unique thing, and its prime goal is to keep us safe in front of Nature’s ever evolving dangers. In order to do that, our body’s instincts, the result of thousands of years of trial and error, have developed an important coping mechanism called fear. Our sense of safety depends greatly on our ability to recognize our environment and understand what is going on around us.

The less we know, the less we feel safe. The more we are confronted with situations that we can’t understand and that are beyond our control, the more we feel fear.

Dealing with uncertainty, conflicting news, conspiracy theories regarding the origins and the motives behind this pandemic, dealing with the longing to return to the normal (the old one, not the ‘new normal’), not being able to see our loved ones — dealing with all of this is harder than anything we have dealt with before.

Thinking about it, the passing year tested us all in many ways. This is the reason I started to publish my ideas. I just felt we must overcome these human parabolas of highs and lows which are, both, beyond our control.

Fear and ignorance, or rather, ignorance and then fear.

In the first piece I published here I explained that behind every human action there are either fear or hope. Both fear and hope evolved for us to deal with the same thing, with the unknown. We fear what we cannot see, what we cannot understand and what is beyond our control, and we hope to avoid or gain, overcome, control, and effect these same things exactly.

Fear than, finds its power in our ignorance.

Now, please don’t get offended by my words, we are all ignorant to some extent and we all tend to fear.

Even the smartest people alive are only smart in their respective field of expertise. The scientist could be a genius in the lab while being ignorant of how to properly communicate with other people. The psychologist could, and should, be an expert when it comes to the human soul but ignorant of the science behind satellite communication. Every one of us is ignorant of something.

Ignorance is not a shameful thing, but it is a lack. A lack of knowledge and understanding.

When we face these things we cannot understand, things that seem to be beyond any human understanding, we start to fear. This is an instinctive human reaction.

Now after this crazy year of uncertainties, where we started to doubt most of the things around us, these vaccines come out. These vaccines are now the unknown that we fear. We don’t understand what’s in them, we do not know the people responsible of making them, and their motives, nor the regulation behind their production and the actual science behind the whole thing.

Some perspective and astonishment

An engraving by Levasseur after Jules-Elie Delaunay depicts the angel of death at the door during the 165 A.D. plague in Rome

Around two thousand years ago, between 165 to 180 AD to be exact, troops returning from a military campaign in Asia Minor, brought back with them to Rome the Antonine plague. The plague got its name from Antoninus Pius, the adopting father of the two emperors who ruled back then; Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Lucius, eventually, died from that plague. The plague waxed and waned for a generation, in its peak a witness recalled that 2,000 people died per day in the crowded city of Rome.

People started to carve special stones they believed to be of power. They prayed for the many gods they worshiped and especially to Apollo, asking for his advice. The Antonine plague eventually killed around five million people all through the Roman Empire and was, ultimately, dissipated by itself.

Around the year 1,334 another plague emerged. This one, like today’s COVID-19, is believed to have started in China, spreading along trade routes, eventually reaching Venice via its crowded seaport. That plague killed an estimated 25 million people, almost a third of Europe’s population at that time. They called it ‘Black Death’ due to the black boils that oozed blood and pus on the sick people’s bodies. The Italian writer, Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived during that plague, wrote that the disease was terrifyingly efficient: “people who were perfectly healthy when they went to bed at night could be dead by morning”.

How did this plague was cured? Well, it didn’t. It was never cured and there are still, very few, cases of some variations of that disease around the world but mainly the Republic of Congo.

Lastly, the Spanish Flu, or the 1918 flu pandemic. The last pandemic that terrorized the world was actually broadly diagnosed in the U.S., Germany, France and the UK but to due these countries efforts to win the first World War, censorship minimized any reports on the matter. Spain, who was neutral during the war, was the only country to report on the pandemic and to seek help. Thus, the pandemic’s name.

Even in such relatively modern times as the early 20th century, there were no antiviral drugs to treat the virus, and no antibiotics to treat the secondary bacterial infections. Doctors would rely on a random assortment of medicines with varying degrees of effectiveness, such as aspirin, quinine, arsenics, digitalis, strychnine, Epsom salts, castor oil, and iodine.

The Great Influenza (The Spanish flu)

The Spanish flu infected around 500 million people, about one-third of the world’s population. Estimates as to how many infected people died vary greatly, but the Spanish flu is considered to be one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

I hope you are now well aware of the existence of varying types of pandemics all through recorded history, this gives us perspective.

What about astonishment?

What we should be astonished by is the following: All through history, whenever a deadly virus was killing people by the millions, or tens of millions, what was the remedy? First it was praying to stones and wooden gods. Then, people were praying to only one god — that’s an advancement you see — and finally, doctors were trying different mixes of unproved and ineffective medicines.

Now let me ask you this. What would you say to a Roman citizen, burning the bodies of his loved ones while the Antonine plague is raging havoc on his city, if he would ask you if you are planning to get the COVID-19 vaccine?

What would you say to a Venetian mother welcoming home her sea farer son at the port, suddenly horrified by his black and blistered skin and his dead crew? Would you tell her that there is an actual vaccination to your-times pandemic but that you refuse to take it?

What would you say to an American father, hearing that his sons are dead not by bullets in the war but by an unreported plague?

This is the true astonishment! For thousands of years humanity faced global pandemics with prayers, chants, and iodine at best.

You are the first generation on this planet that is facing a pandemic with SCIENCE! And you want to tell me that you refuse to accept the remedy provided to you?

Hope against fear, then — knowledge against ignorance

Science = Verifiable, Falsifiable, Repeatable

Not only that we owe it to all past generations to be part of the scientific solution that is provided to us, we also have the power to decide how we want to face this situation.

You see, whatever past generations could do against their pandemics was to hope. Only to hope. Remember that hope is our minds countermeasure to fear. Hoping that their gods will take away the pain. Hoping that nature will cease its attacks. Hoping, however positively we see it, leads us nowhere without true action (praying is not acting).

The only thing we can do to fight the fear is to eliminate the ignorance. To gain knowledge, as much as possible, will allow us to see things for what they are.

Will knowledge eliminate the fear completely? Will it give us absolute control over the future? No, it won’t. But it will help us act intelligently rather than emotionally.

Knowledge will help us see these vaccines for what they are, a much needed remedy, rather than a coax for the “world big reset” — to quote but one conspiracy theory.

First things first, what are vaccines?

Vaccines are, to put it simply, carriers or messengers that, when put in our bodies, tell our immune system to develop specific antibodies. Antibodies, in their turn, are Y-shaped proteins used by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects like viruses or bacteria.

What’s new about the COVID-19 vaccines is that they represent new approach of vaccination process. Many other, or older, vaccine types have put a weakened or inactivated germ, that is — live virus — into our bodies, allowing our body to fight the weakened virus thus, developing the required experience and strength to fight the real, strong virus when it comes.

The new type of vaccines, called Messenger RNA (RNA stands for ribonucleic acid, which is a molecule similar to DNA, but unlike DNA, RNA is single-stranded). The mRNA vaccines teach our cells how to make a protein that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. That immune response, which produces antibodies, is what protects us from getting infected if the real virus enters our bodies. Instead of introducing a weakened, live virus, the mRNA vaccines teaches our body how to be prepared to the future fight using a strategic biological game plan.

But please don’t take my words for it. I highly recommend you to read the following professional sources for more information, information that will eliminate your ignorance on this subject and will eventually reduce your fear from getting the vaccines yourself.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/vaccines-faq — Johns Hopkins University of Medicine

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 — mRNA explained

https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/RNA-Ribonucleic-Acid — RNA explain

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

While it took many years, or yet never in some cases, for earlier plagues to disappear, today’s scientist have found a vaccines for the COVID-19 in less then ten months after the pandemic first appeared in Europe!

Ten months!

This is not magic, not gift from the gods. This is science.

If there even the slightest reason for hope, it is this; we have science and people who use it.

Think for a moment of the millions of people who lost their lives through history due to the lack of any scientific method to redeem them from their pain.

Think of childbirth and how fragile it is to give life. Without science and the medical care provided during childbirth, we would still be burying thousands of new born babies. Only two hundred years ago giving life to a new baby was not at all obvious. What made it so is science.

Think of the so many diseases that we forgot yet that were very common until not too long ago. Science made it possible for humanity to overcome these maladies.

When you call your loved ones over Facetime, that’s science.

When you drive your car, and more so if it drives itself, that science.

When they vaccinate your newborn child against Polio or Hepatitis B, that’s science.

The list goes on and on and on. Everything we use today, for our safety, health, transportation, communication, comfort, is the result of some scientific achievement.

Against the fear you feel from the vaccines, you can fight with the hope that science will again prevail. But don’t just hope; more importantly than this hope, against the ignorance that fuel your fear, you can fight with knowledge.

Read, ask questions, find experts who speak about these issues — real experts that is. Learn and gain knowledge that will help you feel confidence in front of the unknown.

Last note.

I know I cannot tell people what to think, only how to think. If what you read drives you only further from the acceptance of the vaccine’s importance to our future, its fine. The only thing I ask of you is to make the decision only after truly understanding what is it that you afraid of.