All Lives Matter and vaccine denial
What racism and the antivax movement have in common. Plus you'll never actually guess who invented the smallpox vaccine.
Snow was building up around the window ledge, and the fireplace in the corner of the room needed stoking. Yet unbothered and looking straight in the mirror whilst tying his cravatte meticulously and adjusting his wig in preparation of his lecture in 5 minutes, a confident Edward was mumbling to himself audibly, the stern look on his face could hardly disguise his pride and glee:
“The fact that I discovered that it was indeed the hatchling of the cuckoo bird and not its parents, who pushed the host’s eggs out of the nest, would give me enough clout in the circles of the Royal Society to be able to test my hypothesis regarding cowpox on young Jamie Phipps. After Sarah had gotten those ghastly blisters on her hands from milking Blossom, and subsequently didn’t get sick from the old human pox that was ravishing our village, I put one and one together and eventually realised that there was something in the pus of those blisters that was preventing her infection. I must be honest here and admit that I had read a paper translated from the old Chinaman that had helped push my thoughts in the direction of inoculation. But that we would use the pus from Sarah and inject it into young James, was completely my own serendipitous thought experiment. Well of course, except for that negro Onesimus 70 years ago in the Americas. Ultimately that story is but a myth in our world, after all how could a black man think of something as genius as this? Impossible!”
It was at this moment, that the door to his dressing room began bearing the brunt of a powerful series of knocks followed by the brute voice of a man in haste:
“Doctor Jenner, your presence is requested in the banquet hall, you have 2 minutes!”
“May you live in interesting times” is an expression that dates back to England in 1936 when it was first used in writing, yet some gregarious historians have put it squarely in the annals of the 19th century. Erroneous and perhaps rather ironically considering our current quagmire, the saying was misattributed to a Chinese curse. Yet digging through the vestiges of both Cantonese and Mandarin historical vernacular reveals that no such saying has ever existed in either language. Claiming it stemmed from the translation of a Chinese curse is ironic seeing the current viral debacle facing the world and its seeming origin story being set in Wuhan, China. Allegedly.
The closest saying in Mandarin is "It’s better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos" - which in many ways is a better expression, which we should all adopt as it is rather poetic and hides no ambiguity.
But yes, we are certainly living in interesting times. Everything we thought we knew about life and society has been turned on its head. From our everyday routines such as going to work and shopping, to personal relationships and how we conduct ourselves in public. Had you told anyone 2 years ago living outside the Asian subcontinent that we would collectively and willingly be wearing masks in public, people would have labeled you as insane. So far is the notion of mask wearing from our everyday consciousness of two years ago.
Twenty twenty hindsight vision
Many of you will have had some truly drastic revelations over the last year, switching jobs, moving house and generally reassessing what truly matters in life. Relationships both personal and professional have been splintered and forged since the pandemic began. Such has been the collective psychological toll on our species the world over. No one really knows what is going on.
Wherever you are in the world reading this, chances are that last year in May, you were either experiencing or had just come out of some form of lockdown procedure due to the coronavirus pandemic. Even if you hadn’t been mandated by the authorities to stay home, there still would have been an obvious air of fear, anxiety and uncertainty in your household and surrounding neighbourhood regarding the contagiousness of this virus.
So when the story of George Floyd’s death reached the synapses of your frontal lobe, you were already primed and ready for outrage. Whether you physically watched the gruelling tape showing the police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck or if you just read about it, your blood would have been boiling. It is my assumption that even the most hideous of ignorant racists in the world would have felt some form of sympathy for that adult man shouting for his mother in the dying moments of his life. Regardless of what your views are regarding race or differing cultures, it is hard to argue that in this exact moment when you first heard about what happened that all of what you had heard about race would prove to be but a feeble human construct. Yes, George Floyd was no angel and committed a crime when he bought a pack of cigarettes that day with a counterfeit bill, yet every man, woman and her pet would agree that the punishment did not fit the crime in this instance. It would be akin to putting Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s size 18 Converse All Stars on Greta Thunberg’s little feet, it just didn’t fit.
If you haven’t yet seen 8:46, the social commentary by Dave Chappelle on the black lives matter protests and George Floyd, take some time out of your busy schedule and watch it - in fact, watch it RIGHT NOW:
8:46 was Youtube’s most trending video of 2020 and for good reason. Forever the perennial funny man, Dave Chappelle has never held back from criticising and pointing out hypocrisy in society - and he pulls no punches in this video either. Perhaps the most poignant part of the video, even though all of it is significant especially his detailed chronicling of historically violent police digressions, was when Dave spoke about his grandfather being the first black person allowed an audience in the White House and how his grandfather had been born a slave. It was this presciently powerful reminder of how slavery is not in our very distant past, yet very recent and as such the plight of black people all over the globe should not be trivialised. Ever.
In fact, once the pandemic has been overcome in the next years, I would not be surprised if one of the most pressing political issues in the United States will be that of paying reparations for slavery. I don’t doubt this for a second.
Perhaps one of the silver linings of the collective psychological shake up of the pandemic and the horrible death by suffocation of George Floyd and yes the Capitol insurrection months later, will be a sort of moral reckoning of our species. A reckoning that will finally take into account the atrocious behaviour of white men in history regarding their treatment of minorities and the historically disenfranchised. The #metoo movement paved the way to #blacklivesmatter, paved the way to correct speech and ultimately a form of equality for women, people of colour, homosexuals and the entire spectrum of LGBTQI, which have all been historically undermined and devalued in contemporary society.
In this short essay I did not want to go into the detail of covid vaccine development nor the billions of dollars and computing power spent globally that have gone into simulating every possible pandemic outcome both in the world and in our bodies over the past year, no, I will leave that to the more credited news outlets such as Lancet, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and so on. Having myself worked in vaccine development in the late 1990s and being a qualified immunologist I will not even wave that in front of you like some Pied Piper of science, no I will leave that to the professionals. The proof is in the pudding. Vaccines work and stem from a serendipitous place in our history (as the little story that preambled this article showed.) Nowadays I am merely an outside observer of events and as such all I can lay claim to is being a writer. So what I did want to mention here was the overwhelming evidence I have gathered that has led me to believe that there is nearly a 90% correlation between those people who claim that the vaccine doesn’t work or worse will damage us permanently and those people who ignorantly try to establish some form of moral equivalency between the expression Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.
Excuse me Mr Pilot, you're doing it wrong
Just as with denying the efficacy of the various covid vaccine approaches, these people are completely missing the point. The last few years saw every janitor and clued up hairdresser peddling bitcoin investments like some form of seasoned financial advisor, and it is remarkable how many expert hobby geneticists there are out there regarding this experimental vaccine that uses a molecular approach whose inception was created through thorough empirical trial and error and subsequent computational analyses with some of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Again, I won’t go into the details about this mRNA vaccine as it will most probably bore you, but all I can say is that I believe in it and the thought pattern behind it is nothing short of genius and worthy of ten Nobel prizes.
You wouldn’t knock on the door of the cockpit on an airplane flying 10 000 metres above sea level and try to give the pilot tips on how the Bernoulli effect and the shape of the wings is keeping the plane from crashing to the ground, you should also refrain from discussing the merit of individual constituents of this vaccine as if your background lay in molecular biochemistry. As it is absurd and you appear like a moron.
You don’t question your dentist’s approach to tackling tooth decay nor your heart surgeon’s technique at patching up one of your arterial valves right? When you are driving at top speed down the highway, you are not suddenly wondering about how the brakes in your car work when a rabbit jumps on the road or are you? The same blind faith you have with all of these other phenomena, is the approach your brain should take with vaccines. Have a little faith.
The same cognitive dissonance that leads some individuals to believe that they have proficiency in molecular biology whilst not understanding the architecture of a human cell, leads them to believe that they have some form of right to express their moral outrage at the Black Lives Matter movement. It is a type of delusion that stems from centuries of patriarchal race entitlement, a sort of genetic on switch that has provided white people with the belief that they have some form of divine superiority over people who do not share the same skin colour or culture as them. It is these same individuals who cry out All Lives Matter when confronted with an obviously uncomfortable truism. A truism that shakes their worldview to the core.
If All Lives truly did matter, then there would be no need for the black lives matter movement, nor the #metoo movement because sexism and racism would already be banished and true equality would reign all over. And again, I am not trying to equate sexual harassment with social disenfranchisement based on race, but I would want to point out that these two phenomena in our world are at least connected in the sense that its culprits still claim plausible deniability. Just like that supreme court justice in the US, Brett Kavanaugh denied the memory of having held down a young woman whilst trying to get on top of her, many people who say All Lives Matter, don’t realise they are being racist. Kavanaugh can’t remember the incident because he thought erroneously that he was well within his rights to do this, just like how many white people believe it is okay for historical slaves to nowadays live in ghettos with no access to financial aid or help from the government. It is patriarchal and racial entitlement and it is time for it to be wiped out of the collective consciousness of our species just like we are hoping to do with covid in the next months by immunising 90% of our population.
In the beginning of the pandemic, whilst Trump was still actively denying its severity, I joked with my neighbour about how great it would be if the virus had been made in a lab and had been specifically released to kill off racist people. Well it now seems that my humorous prediction is actually coming true as the people who are most likely to not get vaccinated hail from a right wing conservative background, that very demographic that tends to be the most racist. Well, Hallelujah!
Black lives made all lives matter
I wanted to end this treatise by hailing back to Doctor Jenner, the supposed “inventor” of the smallpox vaccine and how racism ultimately does tie into how we record and subsequently perceive history as well. In 1714 Boston there was a Libyan man called Onesimus who had been bought as a slave by a Puritan minister called Cotton Mather. In a reply to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Mather had written the following:
“‘I am willing to confirm to you, in a favourable opinion, of Dr. Timonius' communication; and therefore, I do assure you, that many months before I met with any intimations of treating the smallpox with the method of inoculation, anywhere in Europe; I had from a servant of my own an account of its being practised in Africa. Enquiring of my Negro man, Onesimus, who is a pretty intelligent fellow, whether he had ever had the smallpox, he answered, both yes and no; and then told me that he had undergone an operation, which had given him something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it; adding that it was often used among the Guramantese and whoever had the courage to use it was forever free of the fear of contagion. He described the operation to me, and showed me in his arm the scar which it had left upon him; and his description of it made it the same that afterwards I found related unto you by your Timonius”
So it seems that all of our history in regards to where the small pox vaccine first originated seems to have been skewered not only in its timeline but also in the race of the man who made the initial discovery.
Just like Edward Jenner’s initial fame rested upon his very astute observation of cuckoo bird hatchlings pushing their host’s eggs over the edge of the nest to imminent death, his accolade as the father of modern vaccines was in a way a direct mimic of the behaviour of cuckoo birds. Had Jenner not pushed Onesimus’s inoculation theory out of the nest of scientific history into oblivion, we would all be remembering a Libyan man as the inventor of one of our world’s greatest discoveries, and a slave at that. This would also be ironic if slavery were not so tragic an event in our blemished history.
Go get vaccinated, and stop saying All Lives Matter, because they obviously don’t.
Yet.
May you live in interesting times, like a tranquil dog.
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Thank you very much.
Mauri Ora.
“It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.”
The legend himself, Jacques Yves Cousteau.