Only disease that is curable is insufferable.1
Americans suffer up to a billion colds each year, resulting in 40 million days of missed work and school and 100 million doctor visits.2 Globally, the incident cases reached 17·2 (95% uncertainty interval: 15·4 to 19·3) billion in 2019, which accounted for 42·83% (40·01% to 45·77%) cases from all causes.3 There has never been a graver condition than a cold. I doubt there is anyone who suffers a cold in billions or percentages with uncertainty intervals. There is nothing uncertain about a sharp pain in the throat, a throbbing headache when your head is full of snot, waterfalls coming out of your nose, or sneezing your life out. We suffer from a cold. We cannot say the same about measles, a formerly benign childhood illness in the middle of the 20th century in the United States that became an insufferable epidemiological disease to justify the creation and deployment of a measles vaccine in 1963.4
A cold is a benign illness. For now.5 Until very recently, we never worried about the causative agent of this particular cold right this moment.6 We never wondered if we would be protected from a cold for a lifetime. We knew that we may have another cold some day. Unless you lost your mind from it or got paralyzed by it, you were unaware a cold could be debilitating.7 Unless you connected that anyone died in the aftermath of a cold, you did not think a cold was deadly.8
People have a repertoire of local remedies to relieve nose stuffiness or a sore throat.9 None of the remedies are curative. You recover from a cold. A cold must become a cough that does not go away, inability to draw breath, or forgetting who you are to warrant a visit to the doctor.
Through all of history, a disease was a suffering man bore. Perception of an illness was shaped by intermingling of personal and collective as born by man/body, a person and flesh as one.10 You knew disease because you bore the suffering, as the one who was ill, the one who cared for the sick, and the one who buried the dead and grieved. The suffering was never sense-less. You felt it through your senses and made sense of it. This is how people established common sense of an illness. Suffering had a range of meanings that reflected the worldview of the people who suffered. It did not matter how lethal the disease was - people were able to suffer it, die and live on.11 An illness bound us together as finite mortals. We depended on each other to be ill, recover, and mourn. We rose above it as people through shared suffering.12
Numerical experience of a disease is a historical novelty. It takes a certain kind of man to suffer from a number. It is literally non-sense to all people. You cannot feel a number. Only few people make sense of suffering through numbers, yet even they fail to relate the numbers to their bodily suffering of an illness. A disease that kills half of the people it affects, makes no sense if this particular man suffered a barely noticeable illness and recovered without any complications. A benign cold that leaves you incapacitated makes no sense because it was so crippling for you. From smallpox to measles, diseases were something man suffered as a blessing, a curse, a punishment, or a nuisance.13 A disease was infused with collective and personal meaning, reflective of how these people understood the order of the world around them.14 Above all, the meaning of a disease was reflective of the bodily suffering of an illness. It was not abstract.
In 2020, many educated out of their senses people in the West were incapable of recognizing or suffering a familiar, age-old bodily affliction. A cold was introduced as a never felt before Plague of Times - “COVID-19”. It was beyond what anyone could suffer. We did not have immunity. We did not have a cure. We did not have data. We had an excess of tests, cases, hospitalizations, morbidity, mortality, hubris, and Publick Health Experts.
When a woman had a barely noticeable headache that lasted for two hours, the headache that would not qualify for a cold or encephalitis pre-2020, became an intolerable global disease burden, caused by a BSL-3 level bioweapon and confirmed by a COVID test - deathly millions times over, a flesh-ravaging infection fatality rate, R0, viral replication, multi-organ failure with accompanying wilting of mitochondria, unusual fatigue of T-cells, and the Lost Civilization of Plasmacytoid Dendrites.15 A designer COVID-19 headache meant the extinction of humankind. We rebranded eternal damnation as Long Covid.
There were few ultra orthodox peoples all over the world who continued living their usual lives in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic. They were spared because they did not have the necessary mindset to stop living until scientists delivered a magic cure.16 The necessary mindset was the only thing they lacked. They did not want.17 The Orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims knew that health came from following commandments of God, that healing came from God, that they already had all the cures for all the diseases if God willed the healing to take place, and that a drug could not heal them.18 Upsettingly to the Unorthodox Scientist, these people gathered for prayer and sacred text study, married the young, tended to new mothers, visited the sick, buried the dead, and mourned with the bereaved. These people did not care for herd immunity or viral transmission.
Disease prevention, in the modern population medicine understanding of it, did not exist through all of history. Manipulation of statistics through some intervention applied to healthy people to achieve an abstract health outcome does not make any sense to many people to this day. Wise men of the past understood individual and communal health as wholeness/holiness as daily acts in relation to something larger than us - the whole world around us. You ordered your life in striving for something larger than you and something beyond your understanding. It would not occur to anyone to get vaccinated against a venereal disease to have a healthy sex life with every neighbor out of a profound sense of neighborly love. Today, a religious bioethicist may justify it by crafty re-arrangement of quotes from scripture to account for the God-sent effective medicines and safe surgeries to make “love thy neighbor” into a health promoting activity.
Health was never the purpose or end goal of your earthly living. “I live to be healthy” is a modern invention that makes us not only sick, but incapable of living. COVID-19 as a disease of our own creation was the first insufferable disease in the history of mankind.19 We decided to stop living until scientists deliver a cure to allow life to proceed.
It is true a cold may cause incurable debility. It is true a cold may end your earthly life. It is also true that you can suffer and recover from a cold without any trouble. The same is true for just about any other affliction under the sun. No matter how incurable and lethal the disease, a healing exists for every illness. You do not live in the future. When you open your eyes, the sun greets you every day, no matter your predicament. You do not have any other option but to have a good day, under the circumstances.
LIVE. NOW.
A play on the passage from Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis.
Traditional cultures confront pain, impairment, and death by interpreting them as challenges soliciting a response from the individual under stress; medical civilization turns them into demands made by individuals on the economy, into problems that can be managed or produced out of existence. Cultures are systems of meanings, cosmopolitan civilization a system of techniques. Culture makes pain tolerable by integrating it into a meaningful setting; cosmopolitan civilization detaches pain from any subjective or intersubjective context in order to annihilate it. Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting its necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.
An Amazon pitch for a book Ah-Choo!; The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold. Often diseases become targets for suppression because they are common and disrupt participation in workforce, thus causing “productivity loss” and subsequent economic losses. Damage or lethality of diseases are irrelevant. The cost of theoretical elimination of a disease may supersede economic gains, if you factor in other health metrics. Vaccination is an ideological utopian project in politics more so than a health procurement activity.
Jin X, Ren J, Li R, Gao Y, Zhang H, Li J, Zhang J, Wang X, Wang G. Global burden of upper respiratory infections in 204 countries and territories, from 1990 to 2019. EClinicalMedicine. 2021 Jun 28;37:100986. doi: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100986. PMID: 34386754; PMCID: PMC8343248.
Random statistical data of no particular significance. These numbers are fake and do not correlate to the reality of upper respiratory infections on the ground. These are estimates of some interest to a scientist, and later to a politician, who may use these numbers to pad some agenda for the politics of the State in the realm of “Public Health”.
Measles was a benign childhood illness in the US in the middle of the 20th century. It was common sense perception of it, by the public and physicians alike. Perception of measles was purposefully manipulated to justify measles vaccination uptake and subsequent mandates. Measles vaccine is a prime example of a vaccine that was every bit ideological and political. It was possible to create a vaccine due to the properties of the virus that caused measles and the disease was very common.
Of note, just as disease is never abstract, and its meaning and impact can be assessed only in relation to some-body or people at this place, at this time, with this worldview, vaccination as a phenomenon or vaccination against a specific disease carries different goals and meanings between times and places. It is not a static or stable phenomenon.
It may be easier for many to comprehend the instability of concepts or physical realities we take for granted through a non-medical and seemingly simpler (not really) subject that is more pleasant.
Bois De Jasmin. If You Struggle With Perfume Classics. September 14, 2015.
Back to measles.
Hunter JS, Becker BE. Telling The World About Measles; Case History in Government Information. Public Health Rep (1896). 1963 Oct;78(10):893-6. PMID: 14062220; PMCID: PMC1915318. Deliberate manipulation of information by government to change public perception of mealses.
Sencer DJ, Dull HB, Langmuir AD. Epidemiologic basis for eradication of measles in 1967. Public Health Rep (1896). 1967 Mar;82(3):253-6. PMID: 4960501; PMCID: PMC1919891. Nobody suffers anything epidemiologically. The few people who got too sick from measles, could, appropriately, seek medical care. Instead, we deployed a method to drug all the healthy with a calculation that some of these healthy people will be harmed and ultimately sacrificed for “the greater good” that a politician defined. This is how measles became insufferable.
Conis E. Measles and the Modern History of Vaccination. Public Health Rep. 2019 Mar/Apr;134(2):118-125. doi: 10.1177/0033354919826558. Epub 2019 Feb 14. PMID: 30763141; PMCID: PMC6410476.
Hendriks J, Blume S. Measles vaccination before the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. Am J Public Health. 2013 Aug;103(8):1393-401. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2012.301075. Epub 2013 Jun 13. PMID: 23763422; PMCID: PMC4007870.
Conis, E. Vaccination Resistance in Historical Perspective. Organization of American Historians.
Barrett ADT, Stanberry LR, editors. Vaccines for biodefense and emerging and neglected diseases. City: Elsevier. 2008. - on barriers for measles eradication. Eradication of disease must be questioned as an idea. To paraphrase G.K.Chesterton,
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, an illness or disease came to dwell amidst us. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the reason for this; let us eliminate it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you eliminate it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the purpose and meaning of it, I may allow you to eradicate it.”
I cannot quite locate the source of the following quite, I will and add it. The screen shot is in a Tweet on August 30, 2021.
“In Great Britain, at the moment it is not necessarily logical to say, ‘We can produce a vaccine; let us therefore use it.’”
General interest on the feelings about vaccination.
Conis, Elena. Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship With Immunization. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
More comprehensive texts on the politics of vaccination. The major drawback of these texts is failure to begin with the question “what is man?” and “what kind of man as a body who lives out what he believes in something (what?) can make sense of non-sense that underlies the whole philosophy of vaccination?” There are superficial mentions of worldviews and values, but they seem to be discounted in favor of the larger biological truths of transitory nature. You must begin with some worldview to arrive at a vaccine as a path to health or salvation. Lockdown-Till-Vaccine will make you fall face down.
Colgrove, James. State of Immunity. The Politics of Vaccination in the Twentieth Century America. University of California Press, 2006.
Holmberg, Christine, Stuart Blume, and Paul Greenough, eds. The Politics of Vaccination: A Global History. Manchester University Press, 2017.
General broad strokes of what kind of belief system you must have to make sense of mathematical salvation and biology as ideology and politics.
Midgley, Mary. Science as Salvation. A Modern Myth and Its Meaning. Routledge, 1994.
Pradeu, Thomas. Philosophy of Immunology. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics of Life Itself; Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2009.
COVID-19 was an example of a cold that was targeted for control, elimination, or eradication. All crazy ideas from the standpoint of reality, medicine, immunology, or vaccinology. The most disturbing yet is the very philosophical idea that you, by some unknown law, must be exempt (immune) from a cold. Why? What kind of a world will you find yourself when you are no longer able to suffer from a cold? Bill Gates will fail to answer this question. As will Bob Wachter and other Inglorious Bastards.
A cold can and does cause profound debility from encephalitis, to myocarditis, to killing tissues and lining of organs, to failure of organs, and any other horror you can imagine. You just do not know about it, thus have no reason to worry about it until it concerns you personally. You cannot prevent it.
What is pronounced as the cause of death is often disconnected from a series of events leading up to the straw that breaks the camel’s back. A cold followed by cerebral hemorrhage will be remembered as a death from stroke, not a cold.
People in every culture have their unique ways of handling the symptoms from the sources available locally and familiar to the users of medicines. In other words, they made some sense to the people who used them. They were not universal global remedies targeting an average statistical human.
Moerman, Daniel. Meaning, Medicine, and the Placebo Effect. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Max. AIDS: “I Had So Much Fun”. Maxfrommax Substack. July 31, 2023.
Disease, any disease, is only ever experienced in the context of a particular life, and its impact (the one that extends far beyond the remit of biological or physiological fact) can only ever be properly evaluated in that context, for that person.
Grant, Alicia. Turkey: Religion and Variolation. In Globalization of Variolation: The Overlooked Origins of Immunity for Smallpox in the 18th Century. World Scientific, 2018. Good overview of the realities of living will smallpox when inoculation was available but not accepted by all. An example of a distinct worldview that guided what was possible in dealing with a lethal disease.
Waters, Brent. This Mortal Flesh: Incarnation and Bioethics. Brazos Press, 2009. A short overview of what kind of hell is on offer to you under the guise of medicinal or mathematical salvation.
Worldviews that modern medicine tries to eradicate along with the diseases. In some places it succeeded by imposing a certain understanding of self in this world. Many Westerners experienced COVID-19 as individual or collective immune systems in need of enhancement and continuous updates.
You can pick up any scripture to begin making sense of the world through a different kind of knowledge that we call faith. It does not preclude the use of a scientific method. Rather a scientific method cannot supersede scripture or be the guiding principle of any action. The majority of religious leadership in the world seem to believe in science, medicine, and drugs more than in God, from my observation.
Ragab, Ahmed. Piety and Patienthood in Medieval Islam. Routledge, 2018.
Freeman, David L., Abrams, Judith Z. Illness and Health in the Jewish Tradition. The Jewish Publication Society, 1999.
Webster, Alexander., Heers, Peter. Let No One Fear Death. Uncut Mountain Press, 2022.
Massey, Edmund. A Sermon Against the Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation. London, 1722.
We believe there is an order and some laws to this order. It does not mean this is how reality works.
An assortment of ways people made no sense of COVID-19 on Twitter.
There are numerous scientific reports of the Amish, Ultra Orthodox Jews, Muslims in rural Pakistan, and other odd assortments of people who did not get the memo how to interpret reality correctly according to the latest stale science. The authors are always upset that the people who live normally do not get it how important it is to live abnormally or to stop living altogether.
The first lines of Psalm 23 - The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Just a few quotes to ponder.
If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.
Exodus 15:26
And He alone heals me when I am sick. And He is the One Who will cause me to die, and then bring me back to life.
Surah Ash-Shu’ara 26:80-81
For it was neither herb, nor mollifying plaister, that restored them to health; but thy word, O Lord, which healeth all things.
Wisdom of Solomon 16:12
Every disease has a cure. If a cure (دَوَاءٌ) is applied to the disease, it is relieved by the permission of Allah Almighty.
Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2204
The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "There is no disease that Allah has created, except that He also has created its treatment (شِفَاءً).
Sahih al-Bukhari 5678
Note two different words for cure/remedy/medicine/treatment. One is a definitive substance. One word is a word for healing, which offers semantical ambiguity, albeit the context implies a physical substance or treatment to bring on healing. Intriguingly, all the cures seemed to have already existed.
It was common understanding that healing was the province of God, not medicine.
You can read it disease as a technological and political construct or a disease that may have been caused by some sort of a viral escape from a research laboratory. The purpose of this research is to save us from diseases, supposedly.