key: cord-0723166-mwd457ub
authors: Dossey, Larry
title: The Corona Virus Pandemic
date: 2021-10-29
journal: Explore (NY)
DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2021.10.007
sha: 460bbf00ff907ed3823cc1234bc06946d9a00a35
doc_id: 723166
cord_uid: mwd457ub

nan

Larry Dossey, MD • As I write, the current death toll from Covid-19 infection in the United States has reached approximately 700,000. [1] Covid fears involve but transcend the disease itself, and are global. Zachariah Mampilly, professor of international affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, City University of New York, states in The New York TImes that these concerns take many forms. "September [20201] was turbulent…. More than 200 Australians arrested during citywide protests and a temporary no-fly zone declared over Melbourne. Rubber bullets and tear gas unleashed by the Thai riot police into an angry crowd. Health care workers assaulted in Canada. Rallies of up to 150,000 people across the Netherlands…. The pandemic has coincided with an upsurge in protests across the globe. Over the past 18 months, people have taken to the streets in India, Yemen, Tunisia, Eswatini, Cuba, Colombia, Brazil and the United States. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reports that the number of demonstrations globally increased by 7percent from 2019 to 2020 despite government-mandated lockdowns and other measures designed to limit public gatherings." [2] As a result of the pandemic, people everywhere are fearful for their health and safety, and they are angry at the actions -and inactions -of their governments to protect them. This is predictable in many underdeveloped countries where Covid vaccines are in short supply, but it extends also to the developed nations like the United States, where these vaccines are plentiful.

In some countries, availability of the vaccine does not seem to matter. As I write in early October 2021, only 57% of Americans have been fully vaccinated. On October 1, Julie Bosman and Lauren Leatherbyreported in the New York Times, "An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines…. The new and alarming surge of deaths this summer means that the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, overtaking the toll from the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which killed about 675,000 people." [3] Refusing the Covid vaccine sounds like veiled suicide. People seem to be more afraid of the vaccine than the possibility of death itself.

How do we explain this disparity -an ample supply of covid vaccine and the hesitancy or refusal of citizens to avail themselves of it?

One reason is the avalanche of reports of the problems associated with vaccines in general, which come largely from conservative, right-wing media sources. But that's not the only reason, many of which are detailed in another New York Times article by Tressie McMillan Cottom, "Education Doesn't Inoculate Us from Vaccine Hesitancy." [4] Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science. She writes, "But the truth is that this is a problem that education alone cannot fix."

This issue can be viewed from many perspectives. Among them are the various ways we see ourselves as situated in nature.

In their luminous book On the Mystery of Being, a collection of sparkling essays, Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo write, "We come to realize that nature, far from being a static environment in which we exist and evolve, is an unfolding, dynamic process, characterized by the power of transformation. Our bodies are not separate entities; they extend throughout the whole of nature. This realization can trigger a deep emotional connection, a profound somatic understanding that our bodies are not where we begin and end, and nature is not located outside of us. It provides us with an embodies perception that we are not separated from anything else in life." [5] This is no exaggeration. We exist among a swirl of microbes even in our own bodies, where microbes overwhelmingly outnumber our own cells. This is not a rationale for accommodating the pathogens we encounter in our bodies and our world, many of which threaten to destroy us. It is a suggestion, rather, that we see our lives as part of the natural order of the entire universe, not in competition with the natural order on a small planet in the cosmic immensity. Vaccines, after all, are a byproduct of our understanding of the natural order; they provoke immunity, a naturally occurring process. Vaccines are actually in cahoots with the way nature works: immunity as a naturally occurring process.

War on the entire microbial world is misperceived and suicidal. Multiple processes vital to our existence are made possible by the huge variety of microbes that inhabit our physical bodies. So, in our vigorous efforts to eliminate the Corona virus, a definite threat to our biological survival, let us always bear in mind the entire overarching matrix of life forms that are vital to existence.

We are part of something larger. Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo again: "As the mystics have told us for centuries, we do not live in the universe; the universe lives in us." [6] ~ Larry Dossey, MD Executive Editor

Protests are taking over the world. What's driving them

Despite Wide

Education doesn't inoculate us from vaccine hesitancy

On the Mystery of Being