That difficult vaccination conversation

BitDepth#1334

MARK LYNDERSAY

THREE WEEKS ago I had a long talk with someone about vaccination. It took two days, with a booster last week.

My electrician is an absolute professional, careful and conscientious with his work.

On the first day of working on a project, a mention about vaccination led him to offer a quietly impassioned rejection of the jab.

I try not to be an evangelist in matters that align with personal beliefs, declining to duel over intractable matters like religion and politics. The world is big enough and diverse enough for deeply held beliefs to coexist.

Except when the world isn't big enough and opinion diversity is levelled by a virus that cares nothing about our differences or beliefs, storming ahead with a determination to replicate and spread until it touches everyone, far too many of them mortally.

Over that two-hour, languid chat, I explained what I knew of the covid19 vaccine, the talk rolling back and forth agreeably and apparently with little effect.

Bombers in WWII were being shot down in alarming numbers on missions to Germany, so British command began inspecting the aircraft returning from missions, mapping bullet holes.

The plan was to fortify the areas where the holes were most prevalent until a Hungarian-Jewish refugee scientist, Abraham Wald, pointed out that the exact opposite was needed.

The maps of damage that had been so carefully prepared identified all the places a bomber could be hit and return home. What needed to be armoured was everything else, an analysis that became known as survivor bias.

That story is a reminder that when everyone is looking at the same data from the same perspective, the groupthink can smother the obvious.

Recent urgings and threats to the public to be vaccinated have only led to an uptick in booster shots being administered, with first vaccinations flatlined.

The biggest red flag of all isn't the saturation of the parallel healthcare system, it is the end of mortuary space. This country no longer has the capacity to store its dead before a funeral.

There has been little explanation of the background of research that began with SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, which triggered serious scientific investigation into coronaviruses that attacked the respiratory system.

In 2019 scientists didn't know anything about covid19, but they had a background of research in viruses like it.

What's necessary now is an uncommon level of empathy – something that governments and state agencies don’t tend to excel at providing – to understand what’s simmering in the minds of more than 40 per cent of the TT population.

To do that, we need more people looking at the data that's driving the Government’s decisions, because it's clear that the paternal “your government knows best” position isn't working at all.

Threatening people's jobs if they don't take “Satan's juice” isn't going to work.

The challenge is to translate the deep science that created the vaccines into a local lay understanding that values unprescribed, garden-harvested remedies.

The response must be a patient, informed and committed effort at disassembling misunderstandings and managing apprehensions about the covid19 vaccine.

It doesn't help that the State is so keen to control the information it gathers and to keep the media at a distance.

Starving journalists of access and hard data, while limiting access to the reality of covid19 treatment and its mortal outcomes, eliminates first-hand reporting and reduces journalism to teasing apart PR spin and varnished facts.

Into that void spills an internet's worth of disinformation, feeding an array of belief systems and interlocking arguments that can only be met by conversations between respected peers, not commands from podiums.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there