An Artificial Pandemic

I am reporting to you from inside the covid pandemic in America in 2021. Back in 2020, when we had mask mandates, the number of covid cases began to decline a little, then steeply declined in 2021 because of widespread vaccination. By early summer 2021, it seemed to most of us that the end of the pandemic was in sight.

But only a couple of months later, the pandemic had come back. There were as many people sick from covid (though fewer dying) as during the previous surge. The differences this time:

• The vaccine (from whichever company) proved remarkably effective. “Breakthrough” cases, in which fully vaccinated people became ill, were very rare. Almost all of the covid cases were unvaccinated people. It is a pandemic primarily of the unvaccinated.
• In many southern, conservative states, vaccination rates are very low. In Oklahoma, only about one-third of the people are even partially vaccinated. The main, though not the only, reason for this is that the extremely right-wing people think that the government, at any level, has no right to require vaccination or masks.
• Right-wing politicians rammed through an agenda of blocking mask requirements. In some states, such as Texas and Florida, Republican governors issued executive orders prohibiting mask mandates, even at schools and hospitals. In Oklahoma, not only did Governor Kevin Stitt issue an executive order, but the state legislature passed a law, prohibiting mask mandates. It is illegal for me, or the university at which I work in Oklahoma, to require students to wear masks.

The result is many thousands of people who are sick from, and many more thousands are carriers of, the coronavirus. That is, Oklahoma and other states have a huge population of viruses lurking inside the bodies of humans.

In many other countries, large numbers of people are sick from covid because of limited access to vaccines. But in America, it is because the majority of people refuse the vaccines that are freely available to them—even when incentives are offered. At my university, you can get $100 for getting the vaccine.

And from there, evolution runs the show. Here’s how:

• Mutations occur all the time. The result is mutant viruses. Not all of them, but just a few.
• The greater the population of viruses, the more chance there is that a dangerous mutation will occur. This is where the delta variant came from. This is a matter of probability. If there had been fewer sick people, the population of viruses would have been smaller, and this particular variant might not have occurred. If you have ten times as many sick people, the mutation is ten times more likely to occur. This is exactly what happened as a result of people refusing vaccination.
• If the mutation enhances the ability of the virus to spread to other people, natural selection will favor it. If a mutant strain of virus can infect ten times as many people as a previous strain, it will spread ten times as fast. Soon it will become the dominant, or maybe the exclusive, strain of virus. This is exactly what happened with the delta variant, which is almost the only strain of covid now in the United States.
• Evolution cannot be stopped, even if the majority of Oklahomans reject evolution. It happens anyway.

If you have refused vaccination for reasons other than a health condition, you have helped to create an artificial pandemic. The pandemic would have “burned itself out” and our population might have reached “herd immunity,” to use popular phrases, if almost everyone had been vaccinated. If you refused vaccination, you have contributed to the illness of hundreds of thousands of people and the deaths of hundreds.

If you decided to not get vaccinated, it is not just a personal decision, but one that you have foisted on everybody. On me, for example. I am required to teach in-person classes at my university. Even if I wear a mask, there is at least a slight risk that I will get infected by the virus. The risk is cumulative. If my odds of getting infected in a typical laboratory session are one in a hundred thousand, by the end of the semester with 50 lab meetings, my odds will have increased to one in two thousand. Is this a risk I am willing to take? I should make this decision, but in Oklahoma, that decision has been made for me by the governor, the legislature, and the seventy percent of people who have refused vaccination. Unvaccinated people hold the power of life or death over me. Even if I do not die, I could bring the virus home to infect my wife, daughter, son-in-law, and/or two grandchildren.

Therefore, in Oklahoma, a majority of the people believe that “I have an absolute, God-given right to spread germs to other people, and maybe kill them.” Their right to be free from societal responsibility is more important than the right of other people to live.

The huge number of covid victims, nearly all of them unvaccinated, has clogged our health care system. Health administrators in Oklahoma have repeatedly warned that the system is on the brink of collapse. In some places, covid patients have to wait in the ER for admission to the hospital. In other states, patients are being put in beds in the cafeteria. This is almost all due to people refusing vaccination. Thanks a lot, right-wingers!

In one state, Arkansas, the Republican governor (Asa Hutchinson) issued an executive order banning mask mandates. The order was struck down in court. Hutchinson’s response was to say he had reconsidered, and that his order against mask mandates had been wrong. He welcomed the court’s decision. As far as I am aware, he is the only prominent Republican who has had this change of heart.

The pandemic will probably never stop. The reason is evolution. There will be new variants, and they will spread, even if the delta variant eventually dies out. Thanks to right-wing extremists, who will continue to refuse vaccination, the covid pandemic will become a permanent aspect of our culture forever into the future. I hope events will prove me wrong, but the facts and the reasoning above seem indisputable. That is, unless, maybe, the virus kills most of the right-wingers. But this will probably not happen. They will just remain a permanent strain on our health care system, and continue to add billions of dollars to our collective debt.

Cause and Effect: The Last Refuge of Denialists, Part One

 

In my book Scientifically Thinking (Chapter 9), I explain the different kinds of cause and effect. Almost everything that happens has more than one cause.

Consider the example of hierarchical causation. An example of this is AIDS. If an AIDS victim dies of pneumocystis pneumonia, then you could say he was killed by the Pneumocystis carinii germ. But the reason the germ got a chance to spread was the depletion of the immune system, caused by HIV. The hierarchy of causation is, therefore, HIV—immune depletion—Pneumocystis. You cannot say “HIV does not cause pneumocystis pneumonia; Pneumocystis does.” The simple fact is that they both do, in a hierarchical fashion.

A very real example of people using hierarchical causation to mislead public opinion regards gun laws. I have heard “gun rights” people say that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” The simple fact is that people use guns to kill people. It is hierarchical causation. Nobody believes that guns jump up and start shooting all by themselves. It is just a deliberate argument by the gun lobby to heap ridicule upon even mild versions of gun control.

Washington Post photo

This can lead to a dangerous situation. Many people have lots of guns and are ready to use them at the slightest provocation. And the social pressures against them are dwindling. Some white separatist groups openly display their weapons, clearly wanting us to know that they are ready to use them if something happens that they do not like. During the September 29 presidential debate, Donald Trump said that white supremacist groups should “stand by.” He clearly wants them to be ready to use their guns at some unspecified time in the future.

Another kind of causation that is misused by conservative denialists is multiple causation. This is one that has been deliberately propagated by Donald Trump. Covid-19 is caused by the coronavirus. The United States has now had more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths. But Donald Trump did not believe this. He believed that anyone who died of coronavirus but had previous underlying conditions should not be counted as coronavirus deaths. If you die of coronavirus, but you are old, then you died of being old, not from the coronavirus. Or if you have diabetes, and die of coronavirus, then you died of diabetes, not of coronavirus. Read about it here [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-it-affects-virutally-nobody-trump-coronavirus-rally/]. I have not heard whether, since his diagnosis and return from the hospital, he has changed his mind about this.

The simple fact is that coronavirus deaths, in fact all deaths, have multiple causation. If a diabetic dies of coronavirus, the diabetes had weakened his or her health, and the coronavirus finished him or her off. Both the virus and the diabetes caused it. By Trump’s line of reasoning, if I (a pre-diabetic over 60 years old) die of coronavirus, it is not a coronavirus death. The simple fact is that I am getting along fine right now and am not on the brink of death; if I become ill with coronavirus, this is the spark that starts the fire. It would still be a coronavirus death.

Science denialists like to claim that, in cases of multiple causation, they can choose one of the causes and ridicule the others. This is especially true of global warming denialism, the subject of the next essay.

The Unalienable Right to Spread Germs

Yep, folks, it’s right there in the Declaration of Independence. One of the unalienable rights of Americans is the right to spread your germs to other people. At least, this seems to be the view of American conservatives today, such as Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt who said, “We believe in freedoms.” He said this even while, himself, wearing a mask. While this article is a couple of weeks old, the situation has not changed.

This is hardly surprising. Americans resisted the practice of variolation, which was an early form of vaccination against smallpox. Britain borrowed the idea from Asia in the 18^th century. British troops got variolated, but George Washington maintained that we are Americans and we reject British medical advances. As explained in the book PoxAmericana, Washington finally had to reverse course on this policy, and adopt variolation. But modern conservatives would have continued to reject it.

What this means is that if you are someone who lives in a way that puts you at risk of getting coronavirus, and you are symptomless, or you believe yourself to be symptomless, you can walk right up to me and cough in my face. I will be wearing a mask, but the mask does not completely prevent me from getting the virus. It is more useful in preventing me from spreading it. Being in a high-risk group (diabetics over 60), I could die from the same viral load that would not kill you. But you have the right to do this! It’s right there in the Declaration. Or so many seem to think.

This should not be surprising. Many Americans already believe in the right to carry loaded firearms which they can use against other people the moment they feel threatened, especially if the “threat” has darker skin. If they have the right to project bullets, why not viruses as well?

Why Fundamentalists Must Believe the Coronavirus Pandemic is a Hoax

I have posted a video that describes the ideas below.

Thousands, if not a million or more, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax that has been started by Democrats to make Donald Trump look bad. Part of this is because white evangelicals have, as the title of a recent book indicates, chosen to “worship at the altar of Donald Trump.” In some cases, fundamentalist belief that there is no coronavirus pandemic has led them to acts of aggression, as certain recent viral videos have shown.

But there is another reason that fundamentalists MUST reject the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is caused by a virus. And that is because the Bible says so. I first pointed this out in a blog entry in 2012.

Actually, the Bible does not say that there is no such thing as viruses, or that they never cause disease. But I present below the evidence that the New Testament describes one-third of all diseases as being demonic in origin.

Here is a complete list of Jesus’ healings, in which I indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe garbled transmission is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

Creationists make a really big deal about evolution. Decades ago, they wanted to outlaw the teaching of evolution. When that didn’t work, they tried to mandate equal time for creation and evolution. When that didn’t work, they wanted to mandate the inclusion of a mention of creationism. Clearly, over the decades, evolutionary science has been their target. More recently, they have begun attacking the science of global warming with nearly as much fervor as they once attacked evolution.

But they didn’t have any trouble with medical science. Their children learned about how viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi, and parasitic worms cause contagious diseases, and how mutations can cause other diseases—in medical school, in college, in high school, even before high school. In none of these places, except perhaps their own schools and colleges, was demonology mentioned. I have never heard of fundamentalists trying to get legislation passed to mandate the inclusion of demonology in the medical science curriculum. They chose to allow a figurative interpretation of, or perhaps just to ignore, those Bible passages that attribute disease to spiritual causes. Fundamentalists occasionally attempt exorcisms, but they never insist that the rest of us agree with them.

How can the creationists do this? They think that God has given them the right to decide which parts of the Bible to take literally and which parts to take figuratively. “Day” is literal in Genesis 1 and figurative in Genesis 2; “the Earth” was figurative in Peleg’s day but literal in Noah’s day; and natural law accounts for the wind and the rain and diseases but not the origin of species.

I wondered, in 2012, what God would do without fundamentalists to tell us which parts of the Bible to believe and which ones not to believe. But now I know. They have embraced a literal Bible interpretation to such an extent that they reject medical science, except when they get sick. There are more stories than any of us can list of fundamentalist preachers rejecting the coronavirus pandemic, only to themselves die of covid.

Saving the World—For Whom?

There are numerous ways in which I try very hard to help save the world. Many of these ways have become habits I hardly think about. What are some of these ways, and why do I do them?

• I try to keep myself healthy. I eat healthy, and I exercise—no fancy diets or exercises, just healthy food and hiking. Why? It might seem obvious: I want to be healthy. But there is another reason. If I get sick, the insurance companies and, ultimately, the taxpayers will have to foot part of the bill. Insurance premiums go up for everybody, not just for me, if I get sick a lot.
• I am “environmentally responsible.” I drive a fuel-efficient car, I recycle almost everything, I do not waste energy and water. Why? Very little of it is for my own personal benefit, though I admit that I really, really like my Prius and enjoy paying less for gasoline. Most of my environmentally responsible actions, however, are for the good of society and the world.
• I have also been responsible during the ongoing (yes, folks, it’s ongoing) pandemic by doing what I can to prevent the transmission of the virus. The benefit should seem obvious: I am less likely to get sick. But the major reason is that I am less likely to transmit the virus, even if I do not have symptoms.

In all three cases above, the major beneficiaries of my actions are other people. Not only are they other people, but they are people I cannot choose. When animals, including humans, are good to their offspring, their own fitness is enhanced. And when animals, including humans, are good to other animals from whom they expect goodness in return (evolutionary scientists call this direct reciprocity), they can specify who the recipients are. But the three cases above are examples of, at best, indirect reciprocity: at most, the only benefit that I can receive is a good reputation. All of you out there can admire me for practicing a healthy, environmentally conscious lifestyle. But actually, this doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. While I want you all out there to like me, I will never know whether most of you do or not. I will have no opportunity to cash in on the financial and material benefits of a good reputation. Therefore, the major reason I do these things is to help other people. I’m not bragging; so, I gave away an old waffle iron to Goodwill? How hard was that? Certainly not a sacrifice. Some poor person may benefit; I will never know whether this happens, or who benefits.

The purpose of this essay is to point out that there is something different about indirect reciprocity. And that is: the altruist cannot choose the recipients.

• When I reduce my medical bills, thus reducing everyone’s insurance premiums, I cannot choose whose premiums will go down. I wish the premiums of only people who try to be healthy would decrease. But even if you are a smoker who sits in front of the television, you benefit, even if only a little, from my good health. You’re welcome.
• When I reduce my environmental impact, I cannot choose who will benefit. I wish that my reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, my reduction of the overall use of pesticides (by buying from a farmer’s market when possible) would benefit only my fellow environmentalists. But those of you who drive big pickups around, spewing pollutants from a huge vertical tailpipe, and throw hundreds of thousands of pieces of garbage onto Oklahoma highways (I’ve made numerical estimates of how much), and who viscerally hate environmentalists like me will also benefit. You’re welcome.
• When I do my part to reduce the spread of coronavirus, I wish that the only beneficiaries were others who, like me, restrain themselves from lurid contagious activities in public. But if you are one of those people who take your guns and occupy state capitols to protest against wearing face masks, people who hate responsible citizens such as myself, you will also benefit. You are also less likely to catch the virus, because of what I and people like me are doing. You’re welcome.

Oh, by the way, don’t try occupying federal land or state capitols unless you are white. Just sayin.’ Native Americans tried it in North Dakota a couple of years ago, and many black people are rioting right now in response to the death of...I think his name was George Floyd, but so many black people get killed by cops that I can’t keep them all straight. You have heard about the big riots, but there have been many peaceful protests, such as the one this past weekend in Tulsa. This, despite the fact that the majority of white cops are good people.

People like me, who use every opportunity to act against racism, contribute to a better society. Who benefits from this better society? Even people who hate everyone except their white buddies and who show us their guns will benefit from this better society. I wish I could round up all the racists and put them on a ranch in Nevada and let them shoot each other. But this will not happen. Even though I hate it when this happens, my good actions will benefit assholes. I wish I could snap my fingers and all the assholes would get beamed up to outer space and materialized inside a nebula, where they would burst open and their blood would spew out into the galaxies. But it doesn’t work this way. Once a good deed leaves my fingers, I lose all control over it. The good deed diffuses into the Giant Karma Machine only, unlike real karma, if there is any such thing, what goes around comes around to everybody.

And the same is true of all of you good people who are reading this, since assholes don’t read anything not written or spouted by other orange assholes, whether on certain networks, or in blogs, or via Facebook and Twitter. We all have to just get used to the fact that, by the laws of nature, all our good deeds will end up benefiting, if only a little, the people who least deserve any benefit from anybody. And all of us good people can collectively say, even to those who would rather die than thank us, you’re welcome.

I have one more essay about Loren Eiseley to post, but this essay is timely.

Trump Thinks He Is a Scientist

And millions of his followers believe it. Trump can say anything He wants, without discussing it with even his close admirers, without even thinking about it in advance, and it becomes Scientific Truth. This is what happened when Trump speculated that, since Lysol works so well to kill the coronavirus outside the body, it might also work inside the body. All scientists and educators (including me), and the Lysol corporation, issued immediate warnings to everyone we could. In my case, this was to about a hundred students in my classes.

Here is a link to one article that reported Trump’s statement.

Trump believes that whatever pops into his brain is The Truth. His millions of followers believe it too, even though few of them probably rushed off to drink Lysol. Scientists, on the other hand, examine evidence, which is why no true scientist actually publishes or announces his or her very first thoughts on any subject.