A PANDEMIC OF PANDEMICS
My brother DREWES in the Hague, the Netherlands, sends me every month the digital copy of Civis Mundi, a Dutch periodical for Social Philosophy and Culture. From its latest #113, I translated an article by Dr. Jan de Boer, a historian, entitled, A Pandemic of Pandemics.
Please note the date on the opening line:
August 2024: #8 version of the pandemic.
In spite of the vaccine, hospitals are packed with pandemic patients; it’s a case of the sixth variant of Covid-19. But the eight’s wave is much less unsettling than the new Ebola-hanta-2 virus that suddenly appeared earlier in 2024. It’s a rare variant of Ebola with a tremendous capacity to adapt.
Via the usual exchanges and our growing planetary connectivity, this variety arrived in Europe in May of this year, 2024. This virus is extremely infectious and deadly: 60% of those affected die. In the last three months in France alone some 200,000 have died. (The author lives in France). Everybody is scared witless. The lockdown now is commonplace. Nobody visits family or friends. Schools, stores, all sports, theatres, all closed. When it all started in 2020, nobody could imagine that our society, our world, would collapse like a house of cards. And also, that the life of yesterday would never come back. The start of the latest lockdown happened two years ago, in 2022. People have become resigned to it, because we have no choice.
As I write this today, 2021, perhaps we may still have a choice, a choice between changing our world or allowing our word to collapse. That is the dilemma, because one thing is sure: the Covid-19 is just the start of a long series of epidemics and pandemics. Recent scientific research carried out by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) told us that through the systematic destruction of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, through the expansion and intensification of agriculture, and a production and consumption system based on unlimited growth, (and I add a surplus of people on a planet with limited capacity), the interaction between fauna, cattle, pathogens and humans multiply, with pandemics being the inevitable result.
The report tells us that, until now, there have been some 1.7 million viruses discovered, of which between 540,000 and 850,000 have the possible capacity to infect humans. The IPBES concludes that this ensures that once per decade or even more frequently we may expect a pandemic from a new virus, with the great possibility that a future pandemic be more dangerous and deadly than the current version. Just picture an Ebola virus or the Marburg one, with a fatality rate of 88%, recently again appearing in Africa. Add to that the fact that every virus wants to assert itself and mutates to better cope with all obstacles encountered during its lifespan, including a vaccine. That’s the reason why mutations of Covid-19 become more infectious and now partly (see the Delta-variant) negate the effectiveness of the existing vaccines. If we don’t succeed – and we won’t because we have ears but do not hear and eyes but do not see, as solidarity is pure self-interest, something we fail to grasp – I repeat, if we do not succeed to vaccinate all humans on the globe against Covid-19 and its current mutations, the odds are immense that we will face mutations able to resist the present vaccines.
A world-wide vaccine able to combat all possible mutations of Covid-19 has not yet been developed and the question is whether such a vaccine is even possible. That’s why the future looks dark, because there is no defence against the looming, but as yet unknown viruses vis-à-vis the current Covid-19. Seen from that perspective vaccines fail to offer a solution for the looming threat of these viruses.
This outlook ahead looks even more ominous considering the far too timid efforts to combat climate change and its catastrophic consequences. Global warming enhances the emergence of new viruses and pandemics and the only effective remedy is a total revision of our production and consumption system.
The current vaccine as well as any future ones (I can well imagine that we need a new vaccine every other month) will still force us to deal with the crucial choice of dealing with our impossible economic life. All indications are that we blithely will pursue the route of limitless growth and greed. However, if we don’t change in the very near future, if we don’t assume a more sober lifestyle, and thus persist in the destruction of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, then the odds of the survival of our human society through viruses and the catastrophic consequences of global warming, are minute.
Simply stated, that choice, considering the welfare of future generations, has to be made not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, but now.
So far the article.
My comments.
The warnings are coming hard and fast. If you have a Bible, you do well to read Isaiah 24 which depicts our current situation in gruesome details. Already then, echoed in Romans 8, overuse of land was universal. The Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, centered on the City of Rome. After ravishing the nearby agricultural lands to provide food for its millions of people, the next supplies came from ever more distant regions and were a large factor in the Collapse of the Roman Empire.
Today we face multiple dangers, all too well known. Now too food prices are rapidly rising, thanks to droughts and floods, and dangerous tipping points are clearly in the cards. Young people sense this.
Climate demonstration.
From September 5-12 I was away from my rural abode and spent a week in suburban Hamilton. There I attended a Climate Demonstration in downtown Hamilton, and watched the crowd: mostly young and some old people, no middle age. Will these youngsters allowed to grow old? I look at them, (I have 13 grandchildren and 7 great-grandchildren) full of compassion and tears well up in my eyes: they are – and I hate the comparison – just like the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Europe from 1940-45, destined to become the victims of the looming cataclysm, from which I see little escape.
Warnings are all around us. From my local library I borrowed two books, one by Deon Meijer, a South African mystery writer who wrote FEVER, dealing with a Pandemic that killed 95 percent of the world’s population. In it he described a brutal society where the few survivors cope with violence and internal conflicts. The other book is THE END OF MEN, set in a world where a virus stalks our male population. Both are set in 2024-5, just as the above article by Jan de Boer.
Decision Time.
I truly believe that the next 3-5 years will be decisive for the human race. No nation will cut down on Carbon Use: world-wide 200 coal-fired generators are under construction: we need electricity to power our toys!
A sure tell-tale sign of the LAST DAYS will be is a gigantic earthquake. The Bible repeatedly mentions this as a sure sign of the World’s End: they are described in Revelation 6, in Isaiah 24 and, of course, Matthew 24, and in numerous other places. I can well imagine how the Ring of Fire, encircling the Pacific Rim, explodes in a catastrophic cascading crescendo, with unimageable force.
What I really want to convey is that time is short. The Lord will come unexpectedly and without warning. To paraphrase Revelation 18: 10,
“Terrified at the planet’s torment its leaders will stand far off and cry, “Woe! Woe, our magical world, Our Man-made Empire, Our City of Power: In one hour your doom has come.”