IGNORANCE KILLS

"Oh no, not again!" I can hear it now. Another column covering the Covid-19 pandemic. We are over it. We are sick of it. Understandably, but exactly the point. Given newly published "remedies" to combat the virus, and given the endless predisposition by a significant segment of true believers to oppose vaccination and trust charlatans on social media, the topic remains pertinent. "Ignorance," some would say "stupidity," kills. Numerous studies have concluded that during the past six months at least 200,000 Covid related deaths were entirely preventable. This number correlates to the fact that 99.5% of those killed by the virus were not vaccinated. The results of a study published by the "Commonwealth Fund," (Dec. 14, 2021), projected that due to vaccination programs, between Dec. 12, 2020 and Nov. 30, 2021, 1,087,191 deaths were averted. While this information is readily available, most of those unwilling to lend credence to these statistics continue to be corrupted by "confirmation bias," a national, if not international, disease which compels them to only absorb information from sources confirming what they already believe. After the early discussion about the origin of the virus, which included the suggestion that it was a bio-weapon deliberately designed by China or by Barack Obama, ran its course, the focus shifted to how to combat it. Some of the so-called cures obviously predated the development of a vaccine, but a number of them persisted and evolved into a movement. Eating sea lettuce; holding your breath for 10 seconds; smelling sesame and other plant oils; or cleaning your nostrils with salty water to kill the virus before it can reach your lungs, had a relatively short shelf life. Scientists stayed predominantly in their own lane, rather than spending a lot of time debunking these relatively mundane suggestions. Some extraordinarily freakish ones struck a persistent and dangerous cord, however. Take the recent suggestion by Christopher Key, leader of an anti-Covid-19 vaccine group, the "Vaccine Police." advocating followers drink their own urine to combat the virus. According to him there is "tons and tons of research .... peer reviewed published papers on urine." He calls it "God's own antidote to Covid-19." He also suggests that pharmacists should be executed for administering coronavirus vaccines. His recommendation likely originated in India, where its Hindu majority population adopted the widespread practice of consuming cow dung and urine, branded as "cow dung therapy" for a Covid cure. The Hindu religion places an emphasis on "purifying qualities" of cow products, proclaiming that "eating cow dung will help purify mind, body and soul." The CDC suspects that there is a relationship between the surge of cow-dung therapy and black fungal disease, and that the use of cow dung and urine might actually accelerate the transmission of coronavirus along with other diseases. And who can forget former president Donald Trump's epiphany during a widely viewed public broadcast proposing bodies be injected with bleach and other disinfectants to knock out the virus - "in a minute. One minute!" Of course, bleach is a poison which will make you sick. Nevertheless, the gullible complied, and within a week after he made his suggestion poisonings with household disinfectants increased by 121%. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. remarked: "This the most dangerous and idiotic suggestion made so far in how one might treat Covid-19. Drinking or injecting disinfectant is more likely to kill humans than the virus." The use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria and lupus drug, was more readily accepted by those looking for an alternative to vaccines, probably because it resonated as a medical solution. And even though the World Health Organization debunked its efficacy, and warned that administering it to Covid could even increase the risk of death, its use went viral. In Brazil, materially supported by members of the Trump administration, President Jair Bolsonaro elevated its use to be the primary antidote for the virus. Pushed by his Health Ministry and supporters controlling the manufacture of the drug, and contrary to recommendations from the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases, he relegated funds earmarked for combating Covid to purchase more chloroquine. The result was a national disaster, giving Brazil the 2nd highest Covid related death rate in the world, just below the U.S. and slightly ahead of India. Ivermectin, another so-called medical alternative to vaccination, a drug meant to control parasites in farm animals, also made its appearance among those adamantly opposed to anything proposed by legitimate epidemiologists. These dangerous deviations from scientifically prescribed protocols are relentlessly advocated by those in search of profit, notoriety or political advantage. The opposition to scientific evidence and government mandates has organized and is supported by unfettered access to social media. Some media savvy public figures seize every available opportunity to indoctrinate their followers by spewing venom in attempts to discredit the professionals. "Fox News" host Tucker Carlson publicly compares vaccine mandates to "Nazi experiments." "Fox Nation" host Lara Logan claims that "people all across the world" are comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death." Senator Rand Paul, an ophthalmologist with questionable credentials, posturing as an epidemiologist, takes every opportunity to viciously attack Dr. Fauci and what he stands for. School boards are being confronted by parents threatening to bring loaded guns into a meeting if mask mandates are adopted. And governors in multiple "red states" are doing everything in their power to thwart attempts by the federal government to bring the pandemic under control. The result has been that 36% of adults are still not fully vaccinated. Fifteen percent are not vaccinated at all. Most of them have been convinced to not trust the vaccine, to be weary about side effects, to resort to bogus remedies, and to rely on fake news irrespective of its source. The people in this category maintain a false sense of security and won't follow health safety guidelines unless forced to. They also tend to influence others and spread the disease. Anecdotal evidence emerging out of multiple ICU units indicates that many unvaccinated Covid patients on their death bed confess that they wished they had listened to the science and trusted the vaccine. Theo Wierdsma

2021 RELEASED A GLUT OF NEW VOCABULARY

The assertion that English is a dynamic language, which is constantly changing, may be an understatement when applied to the lexical evolution experienced during the past few years. No surprise that many of us emerged entirely bewildered, lost in a new linguistic jungle we did not know existed. What was genuinely unprecedented this past year was the hyperspeed at which the English speaking world amassed a new collective vocabulary relating to the Coronavirus, the social justice movement and elements of political and cultural militancy, and how quickly it became a core part of the language. In the words of Oxford Dictionaries President Casper Grathwohl: "I've never witnessed a year in language like the one we just had." According to the "Global Language Monitor," which collectively documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language usage worldwide, around 5,400 new words are created each year. About 1,000 of these end up in written form. From these we have been used to identify what words or expressions are recognized as "words of the year." This tradition began in Germany in 1971, and was picked up by the "American Dialect Society" in 1990. Their selection uses any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere during a specific year. This year the group chose "insurrection" as its word of the year. This followed "Covid" in 2020, "Fake News" - disinformation of falsehoods presented as real news; "Gaslight" - psychologically manipulating a person into questioning their own sanity; and "They" - a gender neutral singular pronoun for a person as a non-binary identifier, in some previous years. Oxford University selected "Vax" for 2021, after choosing "Post Truth" a few years ago. Cambridge entered the fray with "Quarantine" and "Perseverance." Merriam Webster used "Pandemic" and "Malarkey" in 2020, and ended up with "Vaccine" for last year. And so it goes. Most established institutions tend to select expressions that are already commonly used, generally uncontroversial, and not designed to evoke anything other than recognition within general parlance. Finalists that might have been considered include: "Lock-down," "Asymptomatic," "P.P.E.," "Essential Workers," "Superspreaders," "Staycation," and others, none of which would have raised an eyebrow. However, we also experienced a vocabulary expansion, introduced by those pushing for cultural changes in our society, that was designed to change the ways we identify people and describe situations. Their word choices are expressly designed to affect how we think about these. The idea is essentially that you can't change what you can't name, evolving into a language which identifies symbolic progress on the liberal end of the political spectrum, placating people, but inviting a backlash from those who want to maintain the status quo. Examples are plentiful. Some have already become politically incendiary. Most of us are familiar with expressions like: "Systemic Racism," "Critical Race Theory," "Cancel Culture," "Black Lives Matter," and "Woke Speak" - a term used by conservatives to identify some of the language coming out of left-leaning think-tanks. But, whether we agree with their usage or not, we can't escape their presence and every-day usage by a significant subset of our population. Consider: "Implicit Bias: - the subconscious associations that cause people to harbor stereotypes; "Non-Binary" - an umbrella term for gender identities that are neither male nor female - leading to a new set of gender pronouns like He/Him or She/Her. We also introduced clarifying language for terms long embedded in our culture, like "enslaved people" instead of "slaves;" "birthing parent" instead of "mother," and "unhoused" instead of homeless. In addition, we were confronted by a never ending series of acronyms. No sooner became "LGBTQ," - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer- a fairly common expression, the acronym expanded to "LGBTQIA2S+," adding "intersex," "asexual," "two spirit," and a "+" to indicate that the term should not be considered comprehensive. For those of us whose minds stop absorbing after five or six initials, we might be more comfortable absorbing "BIPOC"-Black, Indigenous, or other people of color, or "LATINX"-adults of Latin American descent, inclusive of people who identify as neither male or female. While some of these vocabulary expansions only resonate with a relatively small group of true believers, changing the way in which we describe cultural identifiers can accomplish practical changes. To erase references to our history of slavery, Rhode Island chose to remove "and Providence Plantations" from the state's original name; Twitter and Apple stopped using the terms "master," "slave," "blacklist," and "white list" from their programming codes; "Lady Antebellum" changed its name to "Lady A;" and the "Dixie Chicks" dropped "Dixie" from their name. Comprehension improves when you know what the words mean. A robust and dynamic vocabulary should help clarify and facilitate this process. But the infusion of too many value-laden expressions in a single years might amount to information overload. Nevertheless, our politicians will probably continue to fastidiously select, articulate, weaponize and gaslight their cherry-picked concepts for their own purposes, while some of us continue to wonder what happened to simply identifying everybody's word of the year. Theo Wierdsma