Virus warfare

Do you know what's amazing to me?

(Well, lots of things are amazing to me. I can't believe I'll be 70 years old in a few more months – how did that happen?; how do helicopters fly?; how do weeds grow in concrete or asphalt?)

But my flavor of amazement of the day are the 30,000 volunteers who have lined up across 89 different sites in the country to test the National Institute of Health/Moderna trial vaccine (with two doses) in hopes of battling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wow. That's like volunteering to go to war. And in a way, I guess it really is.

I know human trials are necessary for a vaccine that will be used on humans, but who makes that decision? The volunteers have to be multigenerational (Who volunteers their kid for this? Does grandpa raise his hand to test the serum?) and of various races. Some volunteers, I suspect, might have pre-existing conditions – for example, can you take the vaccine if you have heart disease?

If I am already healthy, do I want to get the virus? Do I want to be the one who gets the test vaccine, or do I want to be the one who gets the placebo?

And get this: right now, about 100 potential vaccines are in various stages of development. I guess that means more volunteers. The vaccine study in Oxford (in conjunction with Johnson & Johnson, I believe) will also need about 30,000 volunteers.

Apparently, there is a registry listing 150,000 people who are interested in volunteering for the trials. God bless them all.

Like all vaccines, there is a certain percentage of the population where an approved serum will have no affect. There's also a percentage of the population – about 20 percent – who say they will never take a vaccine.

There are doubters who say, hey, where's the vaccine for the common cold (which is also a coronavirus), or where's the cure for influenza, and hold it as an indictment either against science or a Big Pharma conspiracy to keep people sick in order to keep the money rolling in. You can find conspiracies in everything, if you are so inclined.

I myself believe in vaccines. Kim and I have gotten flu shots almost every year in our 40-year marriage, and have not gotten the flu, which I hold as empirical evidence that the flu shot works, even against a virus that mutates every year.

I thank my parents for having me vaccinated against smallpox when I was a child (the scar on my upper left arm has long since disappeared) and I remember taking the pink sugar cubes filled with the polio vaccine, which may have been a requirement to attend school back in the 1950s.

But even if a vaccine is approved, I wonder how effective it will be in a world filled with anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers? The doubters/resisters probably are the reason why the pandemic will linger until we reach herd immunity, which means at least 70 percent of the population will have to be exposed to the virus. We are currently in single digits of national exposure, which means it will take several more years before we attain herd immunity. In the meantime, the death toll will continue to increase.

(In the 1918 influenza pandemic, 675,000 Americans lost their lives (out of a population of 110 million) in a 24-month span. That translates to more than 1,300,000 million deaths in today's terms.)

You can reach herd immunity with a vaccine, too. So thank you, volunteers. Maybe we can reach herd immunity with a dose of herd mentality.