There are studies that claim that the animal we know as modern man appeared on the earth about one and a quarter million years ago, and if we go to the Judeo-Christian Bible, we learn that God put man on earth some six thousand years ago. I’m not a “literal creationist”, but I like the six-thousand-years thing and use it as a kind of reference for the point at which modern man started trying to give up some animal behaviors.
According to the story, God told Abraham and the Jews to go forth and multiply, which they and all the tribes in the world did, happily because it’s a happy thing, and because in the age before robots you couldn’t do anything without human labor, and in the age before gun powder you couldn’t win any war without numbers. Ah, some of the people who promote/accept gay things say they understand why in bifo times those who were not into multiplication were frowned upon, but the multiplication having been so tremendously successful, that’s no issue now.
Ooh, I have to rat that one of their highly placed advocates, Ms. Lisa Shoman, she who said that she’d be glad if the gay crowd kicked down our fence, well, she was ehm…bumped off a social media page. I should feel sorry for her, because love is all I have in my nature, but in this instance, I don’t. I wouldn’t have the-you-know-what fortitude to throw anyone off my page, but she tried to bully the wrong person, pushed against the wrong fence, and she got rebuffed.
If you want more juice there, the person who came to her aid was Ms. Carla at-the-mercy-of-the-world Barnett, and the last I heard about her is that Vaughan Gill is plugging for her candidacy at some great organization in the Caribbean. Vaughan said that if she got the job she would give us status, but then he said the other candidate for the big job is from Guyana, so I say Ms. Carla can go back to defending Ms. Lisa’s right to write what she wants, because she is out of the running.
Braa, every country in the Caribbean will be looking to Guyana for some Petro Caribe-style largesse. That country is sitting on this crazy-large oil field, and they don’t have a spectacular barrier reef, so they can just drill baby drill. What, did I just read somewhere that the world experts have doubled the forecast for Guyana’s economic growth this year, from 8% to 16%? Yap, the Caribbean will give the nod to the Guyanese candidate.
Forgive me for drifting from my mission, which is to show that I support the vaccine. The first block in my case comes from encyclopedia.com, where I found this statement that “in Western Europe, in around 1800, the expectation of life at birth was about 35 years; by 1900 it was about 50 years; and by 2000, 75 years (with a six to eight-year difference favoring the female population).”
This other block I have comes from Our World In Data, which says that 6,000 years ago the world’s population was 28.3 million; 2,000 years ago the world’s population was around 188 million; 1,000 years ago it was 295 million; 500 years ago it was 461 million; in 1600 it was 554 million, in 1700 it was 603 million, in 1800 it was 989 million, in 1900 it was 1.65 billion, and in 2008 it was 6.8 billion.
You’d have to be suffering from advanced myopia to not see the incredible difference in life span between 1800 and 2000 in Western Europe, from 35 years to 75 years, more than double, and the population growth in the world, growing 386 million in the hundred years between 1700 and 1800, growing 661 million between 1800 and 1900, and growing over 5 billion between 1900 and 2008.
A person would have to be out of their mind, preposterous to attribute the explosion of human beings on the planet to something other than the advancement of medicine, and no development in medicine can compare to the development of vaccines.
Vaccines for diseases such as polio and small pox changed the world, as vaccines for Covid-19 will do one day, hopefully soon. History, at the website history.com, said polio was never a raging epidemic, but people in the US feared it almost as much as they feared a nuclear war. Polio was no Spanish Influenza, but the highly contagious virus killed or crippled a large number of the people it infected.
Dr. Jonas Salk developed and tested a killed-virus polio vaccine in 1952, and after trials on monkeys he vaccinated himself, his wife, and three children to prove that it was safe. Salk did not patent his vaccine, partly because the March of Dimes, a fundraising initiative started by polio victim and US president, Franklin Roosevelt, had supported his research.
Our World in Data says large outbreaks of polio continued around the world into the 1980s, with more than 350,000 cases per year, but because of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative which began in 1988, the number of paralytic cases was reduced by 99.99%, with 42 cases reported in the world in 2016.
Smallpox, one of the diseases that Europeans brought to the Americas, killed three out of every ten people it infected. History says that when the disease was introduced to the Americas it cut down our ancestors here “by the tens of millions.”
The vaccine that began the end of this scourge was discovered by a British doctor, Edward Jenner, who noticed that milkmaids who got infected with cowpox, a milder virus than small pox, seemed immune to the more dangerous disease. The vaccine Jenner developed would be the tool used to eradicate smallpox from the planet, an achievement that was announced by the WHO in 1980.
The story scaring off some people from using the AstraZeneca vaccine is that in rare cases it is associated with blood clotting, and it is understandable that people would become less enthusiastic when they think about that risk, if they haven’t looked at all the facts.
BBC News says that as of March 24 there were 30 cases of blood clotting associated with 18 million doses administered in the UK, while a German medicines regulator found 31 cases in the nearly 2.7 million people who had received the vaccine in that country.
Every life is sacred, but in reality the number of blood clotting cases associated with the vaccine is extremely small. The possibility does exist that if we vaccinate all our people, we might have a case of blood clotting, but that is a disturbance in a teacup compared to the full-blown hurricane of Covid-19 which has thus far killed hundreds and sickened thousands of us.
Health Research Institute said “recent data from the Netherlands and France suggest that of the patients with coronavirus who are admitted to intensive care units (ICU), 30-70% develop blood clots in the deep veins of the legs, or in the lungs” and “around one in four coronavirus patients admitted to ICU will develop a pulmonary embolism.” WebMD said “the rate for getting clots is about 0.3% to 1% over 10 years for a woman on the pill.”
My, if people were as smart in the old days as we are now, if they sneezed on vaccines the way people are doing now, I don’t think we would have been rid of deadly viruses such as polio and small pox.
Please, there is risk in everything, but the risk of taking a WHO-approved vaccine isn’t near equal to that associated with a disease that should never have jumped from bats into human beings.
