Education must drive pandemic response, other approaches risk failure. This is the continuation of the previous story We Can’t Live In Fear Of The Coronavirus Forever Part one
Stopped Debating
The doctor has stopped debating the pandemic with me. He no longer advises me to stick to the law and stop commenting on the pandemic. There are three other doctors, including a Vet, in the group. The Vet supports my comments on the pandemic. The two other doctors, including our family doctor, remain silent. The family doctor disclosed that his wife, a nurse, became infected although fully vaccinated. She had to be hospitalised.
One group member, also unvaccinated, said that he would pray for her. The senior citizen claimed that God has been protecting him and his family so far from the pandemic, among other things.
If we have to fall back on prayer, on the pandemic, we are in bigger trouble than we realise.
It’s common sense! If I am accused of ventilating ignorance on the pandemic and being simplistic, so be it.
I am speaking on behalf of the unvaccinated survivors who touch wood were never infected, including myself, ever since the pandemic began. I should probably get at least a Tan Sri, if not Tun, for writing this after Najib Razak returns as Prime Minister with or without election, before or after GE15.
Dedicated Programme
A nationwide dedicated education programme, carried out extensively and intensively, will restore public confidence, help us live with the virus, bring the country out of the pandemic and put Malaysia on the road to economic recovery. We can build back bigger and better.
Harping mindlessly on booster doses, vaccine for children and bla bla bla on this and that and that and this about here and there and there and here isn’t the way to go on managing the pandemic.
It’s the Malaysian government that’s preventing us from leading normal lives. What happens on the pandemic in Singapore, India and elsewhere isn’t our concern.
I am discovering slowly from social media that despite the passage of so much time, more than two years from Nov 2019, there’s so much ventilation of ignorance everywhere on the pandemic facts and issues.
The ignorance can especially be observed in social media platforms.
A highly agitated senior citizen in Kuala Lumpur called me about the booster or 3rd vaccination dose.
He was upset over Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin’s statement in the media that the status of those aged 60 years and above will revert to unvaccinated if they don’t get the booster, 3rd dose, by Mar 1.
Khairy’s “Threats”
The senior citizen felt that since he has already taken the vaccine, double dose, he could not possibly be reverting to the “lowly” unvaccinated status. “How can Khairy force us to take the booster?” he asked angrily. “If we don’t take the booster, he threatens to revert our status to unvaccinated. This is BS! Something isn’t right here.”
“I have already taken the vaccine double dose. I am vaccinated. How can I be considered unvaccinated again?”
I conceded that I did not know from where the Health Minister got the 60 years old criteria and why he was virtually picking on senior citizens.
I advised the senior citizen that Khairy wasn’t forcing him to get the booster. He had a choice whether to get boosted or skip the 3rd dose. If he skipped the booster, he would revert to unvaccinated status again, based on the Health Minister’s statement on the matter. If it’s perceived as a threat, I added, it’s Opinion and only the court can Rule on the matter.
The senior citizen did not say whether he was getting the booster or considering dragging the Health Minister to court on the matter.
Covid-19 Label For Symptoms
In further ventilating my ignorance on the senior citizen’s query, I did manage to get his attention on the “effectiveness of vaccine”. “According to media reports quoting the authorities concerned, vaccines are not 100 per cent effective, perhaps 84 per cent at the most,” I said. “After some time, it’s said that the effectiveness drops, and needs to be boosted.”
“Of course, taking a common-sense approach, it’s as good as not being vaccinated, if the effectiveness drops below 50 per cent.”
Before he signed off, I discovered that the senior citizen was confused by the entire pandemic situation. I could only listen in silence when he rattled on, ventilating his ignorance as well, on Covid-19, the novel Corona virus, symptoms, and infection.
A senior South China Morning Star journalist, fully vaccinated, disclosed that he became infected. He shared the experience in a blog post emailed to me.
Singapore Foreign Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan has been virtually ventilating ignorance on the pandemic.
He’s saying that it will take a very very long long time before Singapore can live with the virus i.e. Covid-19 related hospitalisation being at a manageable rate for the pandemic to become endemic.
By that time, Singapore would collapse and implode.
The focus should be on making sure that the virus has no place to go and ceases to exist.
That can only be achieved if the people sanitise their hands before touching something anyone has touched.
Malaysia should not emulate Singapore’s ignorance of the pandemic.
There’s no proof that China’s draconian zero Covid-19 policy will work without the participation of the rest of the world. It’s inconceivable that China wants to shut itself off from the rest of the world like the Middle Kingdom did.
Virus or no virus, no matter how high the virus cases go, the US has announced that it intends to end all Covid-19 restrictions in June this year and completely open the economy. There are echoes here of Trump who was noted for many controversial remarks on the pandemic. The then US president described Covid-19 as a very bad Flu. “The virus will cease to exist,” he claimed. “It will be like magic, a miracle.”
Public Record
The following appears as a matter of public record and may provide food for thought. It should be covered in the suggested public education programme:
Facts – novel Corona virus, Covid-19 (Corona virus disease 2019), symptoms, exposure, infection, recovery, memories, antibodies, immunity, overreaction, petrified, unleash symptoms, frontliner;
PCR Tests – inaccurate, false positive (infected but virus not present), false negative (not infected but virus present probably from Flu six months ago); viral load;
Categories of severity – category 1 (no symptoms), category 2 (mild symptoms), category 3 (pneumonia), category 4 (oxygen support needed), category 5 (ventilator support needed), fibrosis (hardening of lung cells or heart cells) – vaccination programme, vaccine, double dose, booster doses, fully vaccinated etc etc.
Covid-19 isn’t a virus. It’s a label for symptoms unleashed by the immune system.
Virus doesn’t kill.
There are 380 trillion virus, 60 trillion bacteria and some fungi in the human body of seven trillion cells.
What does the vaccine do?
It claims to protect from the severity of symptoms i.e. category 3 (pneumonia), category 4 (need for oxygen support) and category 5 (need for ventilator support).
Severe symptoms cause fibrosis i.e. hardening of the lung cells. That causes the oxygen level to go down below 94 per cent.
If there’s 50 per cent fibrosis, there’s no hope.
Again, hand sanitisation is the only way to avoid infection. Science has been unable to fathom infections. It can only tell about infections from the immune system.
If science can fathom infections, it will find the Holy Grail i.e. a vaccine against infections.
According to The Atlantic, science will probably never find the Holy Grail as it won’t be able to fathom infections. – New Malaysia Herald
About the writer: Longtime Borneo watcher Joe Fernandez keeps a keen eye on Malaysia as a legal scholar (jurist). He was formerly Chief Editor of Sabah Times. He’s not to be mistaken for a namesake previously with Daily Express. References to his blog articles can be found here.
The points expressed in this article are that of the writer’s and do not necessarily reflect the stand of the New Malaysia Herald.
Longtime Borneo watcher Joe Fernandez has been writing for many years on both sides of the Southeast Asia Sea. He should not be mistaken for a namesake formerly with the Daily Express in Kota Kinabalu. JF keeps a Blog under FernzTheGreat on the nature of human relationships.
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