In Praise of Covid

Let’s face it, science in 2019 was a bit shit.

Thank God for covid - almost overnight we were able to radically transform our understanding of so many things.

Before the Blessing of Covid (BBC) :

1. We thought that lockdowns were useless. We only quarantined those who had a disease.

2. We thought that masks kept us safe from respiratory viruses like underpants hold back farts - essentially useless

3. We didn’t know we were going to kill someone if we handed them money

4. We didn’t know that going for a pee in a restaurant without a mask on was dangerous

5. We didn’t know how lucky we were to have survived as a species without hand sanitizer

6. We thought that only people who were ill were actually ill

7. We’d been getting getting death recording all wrong - we used to put down the real reason someone died

8. We thought that natural immunity actually worked

9. We thought that actually treating people who were ill was the right thing to do. We didn’t know that what we should be doing was sending them home until their lips turned blue

10. We didn’t know that vaccines also cured mental health issues

11. We didn’t know that sitting by yourself on a park bench, hundreds of metres from anyone else, was a really deadly and irresponsible thing to do

12. We didn’t know that so many young people just dropped dead of heart attacks, or had strokes. Stupidly, we thought these things were really rare

13. We didn’t know that the best way to bring kids up was to make them afraid of everything they touched or afraid of every person they met

14. We never knew just how many of us were walking around completely without any symptoms of anything and just spreading our nasty, icky disease-ridden breath everywhere

15. We thought that mass testing of people without symptoms was really dumb

16. We thought the best way to figure out complex and poorly-understood issues was to have free and open debates

17. We didn’t know that the best thing to do with trial data for experimental drugs was to hide it for 55 years

18. We thought that complex mathematical models actually had to match reality

19. We foolishly thought the purpose of a vaccination was to give ourselves protection against infection - we now know vaccines only work in the presence of other vaccinated people

20. We didn’t know Fauci IS the science - he revealed this to us this year

Covid has brought about a very radical transformation of science in such a short timespan - it’s up there with Newton, Darwin and Einstein. I shudder to think of all the scientific blind alleys we’d have gone down had the Blessed Covid not arrived to show us the truth.

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