Damned pandemic

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

SOMETIMES it’s a blessing to be out of Trinidad when you get some Trinidadian news. Like this week, when my editor told me there were 800K vaccine doses in the country – but no one wants them.

When you hear something like this, you stop dead in your tracks. Then you pick your jaw up from off the floor and ask the person who told you to say it again because you want to look for the smile when they repeat it.

But it’s no joke.

Even being Trinidadian yourself, and understanding the intricate inner workings of our stupidity, you baulk at this hurdle. You can handle regular self-interest Trini stupidity, like when Abu Bakr commanded “the people” to rise up and help him – and they rose up and helped themselves to Michael-waves, fancy blended “Scutch” and flat-screen TVs.

But Trini self-abnegation out of pure firetrucking ignorance you refuse.

No! I said. Not possible!

Nurses, said my editor, are refusing the jab. And police and prison officers.

Picked jaw up again, asked for repeat.

Still no smile.

When you’ve got past denial, you move to anger.

If I were in Trinidad, you think, I would burn the place to the ground because it doesn’t deserve to exist.

But then, thankfully, you can skip all the other stages of grief and move straight to the ultimate Trinidadian cure-all: comedy.

No sense burning the place to the ground.

They’ll be doing it themselves in a few months.

It’s true and entirely predictable.

Without 80 to 90 per cent uptake of the vaccine, the virus will press on with its mission, which is to perfect itself so that the vaccines these stupid, ignorant people are scorning now will become less effective. With 400K adults refusing even a single shot in a population as small as ours, the delta or boris variant will run riot and build on its own strengths in a geometric progression. The epsilon variant may well come out of Morvant-Laventille, or some other tightly packed Trinidadian community, where people live on top of one another and look from their kitchen windows into the neighbour’s bedroom, like Westmoorings town houses.

What is wrong with these people, you ask yourself? Don’t they see the CNN and BBC and Al-Jazeera stories that make it clearer by the day that this damned pandemic is now the pandemic of the unvaccinated? Don’t they see the doctors making a candlelight vigil to draw attention to Florida having more covid19 deaths than anywhere else in the world? Don’t they see the thugs in the American school board meetings threatening to beat people who want to wear masks?

Of course they don’t.

They’re not watching the world’s independent media.

They’re watching Fox News.

And WhatsApp videos.

And reading the Facebook posts of people who would not pass chemistry CXC and reposting angrily about their right not to wear a mask and their right to take horse worm medicine being taken away.

The hard, sad truth is that the anti-vaxxers aren’t clever enough to realise they’re being made fools of. And they all ratify one another in a belief that, though they are stupid, they are actually clever. This is why they shout “sheeple” at people who try to correct them: because, at the back of their minds, they know they are not Albert Einstein.

So the pandemic will rage amongst the unvaccinated, who will have the most deaths – probably statistically the only deaths – and the Government will have to spend all its time and energy trying to figure out if it can and whether it should make vaccination mandatory.

And while that is happening, the stupid anti-vaxxers, clinging to their “research” and their horse worm medicine, will get sick and die.

And the poor people of the country, who need the economy to reopen more desperately than anyone else, will get poorer and more desperate.

And they will riot.

Burning and looting tonight.

And they will blame the Government for failing them.

Because they are too stupid to realise that they have failed the Government, the country and the rest of the citizenry.

We have 800K doses of vaccine in the country, the only thing that gives us a chance of coming out of this nightmare.

And no one wants them.

Well, good for all you.

This is no longer a damned pandemic.

It is a pandemic of the damned.

BC Pires is going with the lateral flow. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com