Ending the Virus

THE WORLD'S MOST OFTEN ASKED QUESTION NOWADAYS  is probably 'when will the virus go away"? The answer, of course, is that it will go away when the human race, using good sense and science, makes it go away. it is becoming, even to the lay observer, increasingly clear that in fact Covid 19 is likely to never go away entirely, but rather to become a staple in humanity's collection of viral diseases,, and annual event, much like the flu. The first flu vaccine was deployed in 1940, after decades of looking for one. But the flu virus proved to be highly mutatable, and every year a new vaccine must be developed and deployed, taylored to what medical scientists expect to be next year's version of influenza. Sometimes the annual vaccine is quite accurate and effective, other years, not so much. it is becoming increasingly clear that Covid 19 is also a highly adaptable, mutatable little devil, and that vaccines for it will have to be the same, redesigned each and every year. Over the past twenty years one virus after another has reared its ugly little head. Sars, Ebola, to name but a pair. AS homo sapien sapiens continues to destroy more natural habitat and replacing it with cities and suburban sprawl, the virus, like all other life forms, look for new places to exist. The viruses, like other wile plants and animals, begin to invade human territory, just as humans have invaded and destroyed theirs. It may well be that the human future includes a great deal of mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing, and vaccine seeking, as one new virus after another comes out of the wilderness and infects people, rather than just other animals. It is to be hoped that each time a new variety of viral disease begins to spread and kill, that right wing pompous demagogues don't dismissively react by calling the new disease a "little flue", or a "hoax", as they have done with Covid 19. And perhaps at some distant and glorious time in the future, a peculiar variety of human being, the extremely conservative narrow minded ignorant evangelical christian will be extinct, no longer around to remind us that sacred scripture, which is inerrant, tells us that just before the end of days all manner of disease and catastrophe shall occur, but that the lord shall soon return, sweeping out of the sky to rapture the faithful into heaven, and to leave the rest of us to fight viruses and other miseries. Then, we the sane will no longer have these inert doom sayers among us, telling us about our sins, while doing nothing to help combat our afflictions.