This commentary is by Walt Amses, a writer who lives in North Calais.
As China launches a hypersonic missile reportedly capable of attaining velocity four times the speed of sound; Russia obliterates one of its own satellites, littering the great beyond with dangerous “space junk,” and NASA attempts to alter the trajectory of an asteroid, science fiction writ large is becoming reality, as usual, well above most of our heads both literally and figuratively.
And even as our destiny is being written in the stars, the ancient past continues haunting life on earth like nothing has in any of our lifetimes or those of our ancestors.
While the future is boundless, extending well beyond our collective imagination, whether or not we get to experience any of the wonders it promises may very well depend on how humanity responds to a virus, an ancient, organic, acellular entity without a cellular structure of its own, considered a nonliving particle by many scientists.
But its life status is completely immaterial. To be a virus is to be a survivor, and having preceded human life by an estimated 3.5 billion years, they’ve had plenty of practice.
The irony of the present pits two realms of scientific exploration at near opposite ends of the spectrum: one traveling ever faster and going exponentially farther; and one decidedly earthbound. We are at once awed by our enormous interstellar achievements while terrified by a threat smaller than a human cell, so tiny it cannot be discerned even under a light microscope, able to hitch an often deadly ride on the smallest of sneeze droplets.
Although noncellular, a virus has the nasty tendency to invade healthy cells, essentially hijacking them to replicate itself, often throughout the host, which, in the case of Covid-19, is us.
We’re lucky enough to live at a time where the genius of science has us thinking about landing men on Mars; where private — albeit hugely wealthy — citizens launch themselves into space; and teams of epidemiologists develop effective vaccines in stupefyingly record times to halt a global pandemic in its tracks. If only….
Unfortunately, our luck runs out when it comes to having the kind of cohesive bond with each other that would bring us together in the way 9/11 did 20 years ago. The politically manufactured chasm between us comes at precisely the wrong moment. Our disagreements over simple facts feel insurmountable as they become increasingly dangerous.
And now comes Omicron, designated a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization barely a week ago, overspreading the planet as quickly as any hypersonic missile with the potential of a far greater human disaster. It appears more transmissible than even the Delta variant still wreaking havoc in many areas, including here in Vermont.
While we know there are at least 30 mutations, we do not yet know if they are significant. According to a report this week in The Atlantic, “there is much we don’t yet know. It is expected, as more data is generated, that by mid-December we should have a clearer picture of what we’re dealing with.” The one prevailing recommendation is to get vaccinated. If you have been, get a booster as soon as you’re eligible.
While vaccines are an extremely effective protection from the virus, they need to find their way into more arms if we maintain any hope of ending this pandemic. That’s where vaccine equity becomes the overriding issue. Poor countries wanting to vaccinate their citizens often find vaccines scarce or unavailable, while tens of millions in wealthier nations where vaccinations are readily accessible refuse to take them.
But the world is getting smaller and more interconnected. And whether we like it or not, we’re a community and, with or without our permission, what happens to any of us impacts all of us, particularly when it comes to a pandemic.
The isolationist notion of “going it alone,” protecting only your own country, simply doesn’t work, as we’ve seen in the nearly two years that Covid-19 has been with us. If people either don’t have equal access to resources for protecting themselves or otherwise refuse to consider vaccination, the virus will not only continue to spread, but continue to mutate as well, which is what’s happened with the Omicron variant. At midweek, it was still too early to know exactly how deadly it is or tell whether it’s capable of dodging antibodies or resisting vaccines.
Hopefully, that vital data will be available soon, but even if Omicron turns out to be a false alarm, it won’t be the last variant to emerge. The virus will continue mutating as long as there are hosts, and ample hosts will remain available as long as people remain unvaccinated.
The means to end this plague are readily available, yet resistance to the cure seems to be growing around the world, with anti-vaccine activists, Covid deniers and an evolving network of hate groups joining forces with far-right radicals and QAnon influencers to spread medical misinformation and organize violent protests in several European countries.
As we await the verdict from the scientific and medical community, the recommendations for staying healthy and safe remain the same: Mask up, socially distance, and vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. When we navigate through the carefully crafted doubt and confusion generated by conspiracy theories to clearly see how this virus can be mitigated and eventually eliminated, the course of action is shockingly simple. Where we go from here is up to us.
This isn’t rocket science.
