Just some musings here
Upon a harrowing year,
One that makes me wonder,
“Was science cut asunder?”
Science. “Follow the science.” It’s an expression that encapsulates the topic du jour during all the du jours of the pandemic. Along the path of this race to eliminate a foxy predator, the saying has morphed from “isolate” to “vaccinate,” and now to “mandate.” And all the while the fox continues to run through the planetary henhouses of human habitation, evading entrapment by morphing faster than the science that chases it.
At first, there really wasn’t any science. Sure, the medical professionals knew there was some sort of respiratory SARS-like disease in 2019; after all, we had been through this before. But this new disease appeared to outrace medical science, then caught flat-footed at the outset and throughout 2020 as it ran to catch up. The disease is still running faster, shape-shifting as it goes. COVID-19 is quick and smart like a fox, a modern Huli Jing. Not only has it shifted form, but it has also circled round and nipped us on our unprotected backside. And there’s little doubt that this chimera will shift shape again and again, eluding the huntsmen in one form or another, probably by hiding in the thickets of mammal populations.
There’s no denying that the fox had gotten into the henhouses of care homes and no doubt that it outfoxed the immune systems of the weakest and most elderly adult population. But not all succumbed. Millions, in fact, survived even before there was any “science” to follow. I suppose we can say the same for every plague, every pandemic. There are survivors, and, so far, you and I have been among them. But did you survive because you followed “the science” or because you stayed out of the henhouses?
“Consider,” you say, “that at the time the best science was actually ‘to stay out of the henhouses,’ to stay in one’s own house, to isolate. That was the science at the beginning. It was the tactic used by ancient and medieval people during plagues. For all our supposed technical and medico-technical sophistication, we were at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 no different from the aristocrats who retreated to their countryside villas or stone towers. The science was absence.”
What is both frustrating and intriguing about this pandemic is that it appears to have been the product of the very houndsmen themselves, the researchers who now chase down the disease, this modern Huli Jing that has entered the planetary henhouse. We ask in disbelief: “Were these researchers misguided alchemists that released a monster of their own making?” The answer to that question lies in a recent report released by a group of independent researchers that go by the acronym DRASTIC (for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). “EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in concert with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) attempted to carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity Bat Coronavirus research that would clearly qualify as Gain of Function (GoF), in a grant proposal submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.” *
As “science” followed the fox around the world, the clever beast ran through thickets of ephemeral human defenses as through they were gaping holes. As of this writing at the beginning of autumn, 2021, 1.6% of those US citizens who contracted the disease died either from it directly or from the disease’s exacerbating “co-morbidities.” That appears to be a frightening percentage, but in absolute numbers a little less so, as 42.5 million Americans have been either symptomatic or asymptomatic after being infected. That more than forty million people have had the disease and survived and that many of them survived even before there was any “science” save absence, seems to belie the advice of the scientists who proclaim that the unvaxxed will die. That so many survived indicates that the fox can’t, even by shape-shifting, catch and devour all the hens. Of course, for anyone who lost a family member or friend and for those who worked to exhaustion trying to save the afflicted, the pursuit of this modern Huli Jing has been a grueling test of both emotional and physical survival across the planet. This has been a hunt in which the fox outsmarted those creators-turned-hunters, and because of its elusiveness, this chimeric fox has made the general population wary of the scientists and their proclamations.
All the while the fox has been loose, scientists continue to track it, discovering in the hunt that this is not an easy animal to trap. It’s shapeshifting has now enabled it to go not only into the henhouse, but into the lion’s den, where those large predators have become the fox’s prey. Lions and tigers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo have been infected. This is a viral fox that will do what most viruses are theoretically capable of doing, crossing species barriers. COVID the Fox has already moved from bat populations to human, and now it has outwitted the immune systems of other mammals. Residing where it can, the virus might eventually find in some animal a refugium until it randomly re-emerges to feast on human cells.
This clever fox will probably plague us for many years the way the flu plagues us. That is a bit scary, but the survival of those 40 million-plus who were infected in the United States in 2020 and 2021 bodes well for humanity in general if not for those individuals that make up that 1.6%.
However, what does not bode well is the practice by private and public scientists to carry out more experiments on pathogens, many such experiments run without any oversight. A September, 2021, report by Betsy McKay and Amy Deckser Marcus in The Wall Street Journal carries the claim that only five percent of national governments “provide oversight for research on dangerous pathogens.” ** Because so many are involved in such research and because within that population of scientists there potentially lie both incompetent and evil members toying with pathogens, I fear that COVID-19 isn’t the only fox that will threaten the henhouse. The next “fox” might emerge from any country where such research occurs, appearing not just as Huli Jing from China, but as an Armenian Nhang, an Indian nāgá, a Nordic Nisse, a Japanese kitsune, a Somali Qori ismaris, a Bulgarian Vrkolak, a Russian Volkolak, an Iranian rakshasa, or some other shapeshifting pathogen that researchers accidentally or purposefully release.
Follow the science? Maybe the better advice is to follow the scientists to see what they are doing.
Notes:
*https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/22/report-wuhan-lab-sought-funding-to-create-release-enhanced-coronaviruses-into-bats/ and other sites, such as https://clashdaily.com/2021/09/bombshell-report-wuhan-scientists-planned-to-release-genetically-enhanced-coronaviruses-into-bats-in-2018/
** 24 Sept 2021. Virus Research has Exploded Since Covid-19 Hit. Is it Safe? https://www.wsj.com/articles/since-covid-19-hit-research-on-viruses-has-exploded-is-it-safe-11632496218 Accessed September 24, 2021.
Upon a harrowing year,
One that makes me wonder,
“Was science cut asunder?”
Science. “Follow the science.” It’s an expression that encapsulates the topic du jour during all the du jours of the pandemic. Along the path of this race to eliminate a foxy predator, the saying has morphed from “isolate” to “vaccinate,” and now to “mandate.” And all the while the fox continues to run through the planetary henhouses of human habitation, evading entrapment by morphing faster than the science that chases it.
At first, there really wasn’t any science. Sure, the medical professionals knew there was some sort of respiratory SARS-like disease in 2019; after all, we had been through this before. But this new disease appeared to outrace medical science, then caught flat-footed at the outset and throughout 2020 as it ran to catch up. The disease is still running faster, shape-shifting as it goes. COVID-19 is quick and smart like a fox, a modern Huli Jing. Not only has it shifted form, but it has also circled round and nipped us on our unprotected backside. And there’s little doubt that this chimera will shift shape again and again, eluding the huntsmen in one form or another, probably by hiding in the thickets of mammal populations.
There’s no denying that the fox had gotten into the henhouses of care homes and no doubt that it outfoxed the immune systems of the weakest and most elderly adult population. But not all succumbed. Millions, in fact, survived even before there was any “science” to follow. I suppose we can say the same for every plague, every pandemic. There are survivors, and, so far, you and I have been among them. But did you survive because you followed “the science” or because you stayed out of the henhouses?
“Consider,” you say, “that at the time the best science was actually ‘to stay out of the henhouses,’ to stay in one’s own house, to isolate. That was the science at the beginning. It was the tactic used by ancient and medieval people during plagues. For all our supposed technical and medico-technical sophistication, we were at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 no different from the aristocrats who retreated to their countryside villas or stone towers. The science was absence.”
What is both frustrating and intriguing about this pandemic is that it appears to have been the product of the very houndsmen themselves, the researchers who now chase down the disease, this modern Huli Jing that has entered the planetary henhouse. We ask in disbelief: “Were these researchers misguided alchemists that released a monster of their own making?” The answer to that question lies in a recent report released by a group of independent researchers that go by the acronym DRASTIC (for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). “EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in concert with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) attempted to carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity Bat Coronavirus research that would clearly qualify as Gain of Function (GoF), in a grant proposal submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.” *
As “science” followed the fox around the world, the clever beast ran through thickets of ephemeral human defenses as through they were gaping holes. As of this writing at the beginning of autumn, 2021, 1.6% of those US citizens who contracted the disease died either from it directly or from the disease’s exacerbating “co-morbidities.” That appears to be a frightening percentage, but in absolute numbers a little less so, as 42.5 million Americans have been either symptomatic or asymptomatic after being infected. That more than forty million people have had the disease and survived and that many of them survived even before there was any “science” save absence, seems to belie the advice of the scientists who proclaim that the unvaxxed will die. That so many survived indicates that the fox can’t, even by shape-shifting, catch and devour all the hens. Of course, for anyone who lost a family member or friend and for those who worked to exhaustion trying to save the afflicted, the pursuit of this modern Huli Jing has been a grueling test of both emotional and physical survival across the planet. This has been a hunt in which the fox outsmarted those creators-turned-hunters, and because of its elusiveness, this chimeric fox has made the general population wary of the scientists and their proclamations.
All the while the fox has been loose, scientists continue to track it, discovering in the hunt that this is not an easy animal to trap. It’s shapeshifting has now enabled it to go not only into the henhouse, but into the lion’s den, where those large predators have become the fox’s prey. Lions and tigers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo have been infected. This is a viral fox that will do what most viruses are theoretically capable of doing, crossing species barriers. COVID the Fox has already moved from bat populations to human, and now it has outwitted the immune systems of other mammals. Residing where it can, the virus might eventually find in some animal a refugium until it randomly re-emerges to feast on human cells.
This clever fox will probably plague us for many years the way the flu plagues us. That is a bit scary, but the survival of those 40 million-plus who were infected in the United States in 2020 and 2021 bodes well for humanity in general if not for those individuals that make up that 1.6%.
However, what does not bode well is the practice by private and public scientists to carry out more experiments on pathogens, many such experiments run without any oversight. A September, 2021, report by Betsy McKay and Amy Deckser Marcus in The Wall Street Journal carries the claim that only five percent of national governments “provide oversight for research on dangerous pathogens.” ** Because so many are involved in such research and because within that population of scientists there potentially lie both incompetent and evil members toying with pathogens, I fear that COVID-19 isn’t the only fox that will threaten the henhouse. The next “fox” might emerge from any country where such research occurs, appearing not just as Huli Jing from China, but as an Armenian Nhang, an Indian nāgá, a Nordic Nisse, a Japanese kitsune, a Somali Qori ismaris, a Bulgarian Vrkolak, a Russian Volkolak, an Iranian rakshasa, or some other shapeshifting pathogen that researchers accidentally or purposefully release.
Follow the science? Maybe the better advice is to follow the scientists to see what they are doing.
Notes:
*https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/22/report-wuhan-lab-sought-funding-to-create-release-enhanced-coronaviruses-into-bats/ and other sites, such as https://clashdaily.com/2021/09/bombshell-report-wuhan-scientists-planned-to-release-genetically-enhanced-coronaviruses-into-bats-in-2018/
** 24 Sept 2021. Virus Research has Exploded Since Covid-19 Hit. Is it Safe? https://www.wsj.com/articles/since-covid-19-hit-research-on-viruses-has-exploded-is-it-safe-11632496218 Accessed September 24, 2021.
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