Editorial/Opinion – As pharmaceutical companies move onto human testing for a resolution to Covid-19, many worry about the effects of these drugs and/or vaccines in the long run.
I can still remember getting vaccinated in grade school. I remember my very first shot at that time and I was petrified. I’d seen my heroes getting vaccinated on TV all the time in film, but being in front of a nurse holding a syringe is an entirely different thing. I’m sure you can all concur. But get vaccinated I did—we all did at that time—and we’re all a-ok, as they say.
But times are certainly different. In an era where something like Covid-19 is a possibility, the probability of a vaccine going awry is in fact quite possible, but the dreams being conjured up by most online is highly unlikely … or is it?
I grew up reading books like I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. For those a tad younger out there, it was what the Will Smith movie was based on. So seeing in fiction what can go wrong with a vaccine was of course the first thing I thought about when I heard of pharmaceutical companies coming up with one for Covid-19, but the reality and the fear is of course something very different from the other.
The fears online, as crazy as they are
So is a dystopian future what awaits us all, and sooner rather than later? Perhaps … perhaps not. The future many online soothsayers are predicting is highly impossible according to many out there, but I’ve always been of the thought that anything is possible. There were once those that thought the world was flat, and there were once those that said that flues like the Spanish Flu, Polio and many others were things of the past—things we (Humanity) had overcome. But yet here we are again, with a flu that has increasingly shown that it has become quite unmanageable. And albeit, yes, there is a high possibility that this flu here was man-made, but still, here we all are, and all of us, or rather most of us are in the same boat.
Recent Johnson & Johnson offering
Johnson and Johnson recently offered their very own vaccine, and it was covered on many news outlets across the world that it wasn’t proper at all. In fact, it had side-effects that sounded quite familiar indeed. Johnson & Johnson stopped all trials and testing of their now infamous vaccine because a test subject volunteer contracted an “unexplained illness” from it! Sound familiar? It did to me, and those fans of I Am Legend in its film form were definitely reminded of a scathing segment from the film in which the character of Dr. Krippin states that they have found a cure for cancer by morphing the measles virus into something positive for the body. And in this case, the result was disastrous.
Fact and fiction, friends … a fine line indeed.
Rumors of Bill Gates
And as a stir online is quite capable of doing, it has created quite a panic and one that has definitely caused a few rumors to circulate; a very popular one was that Bill Gates himself created the virus just so he could get richer by providing the world with his very own vaccine. And yes, this all sounds like something out of a horror movie and/or novel, but again, I digress as we’ve already covered that.
Keep calm and await the facts from trusted sources
But in the end, what are we supposed to do …? Suit up and arm ourselves and await for the zombie apocalypse? No way. That’s the last thing we should do. We should all do our part in ridding the world of this flu, follow the rules, and perhaps learn a collective lesson, and one that’s perhaps most important of all: learn humility as a human race … learn that we are at the mercy of nature and always have been and forever will be. We should learn to treat this planet better, its animals better and ourselves better; we should learn that we don’t know everything, and once we’ve overcome something, we should always be ready for it to return, as we are human, you are human … and perhaps in the end that and only that is our legend.
