Cut out the religious dogma from Covid-19 vaccines

You are caught up in a heavy traffic jam, requiring you to keep a delicate balance between the clutch and the accelerator on your manually transmitted gear system.

Ahead of you, you can see a trail of tail lights stretching as far as the eyes can see, indicating that you are in a terribly long queue of vehicles. It soon dawns on you that it will take not less than an hour-and-a-half to reach home.

In the confusion that ensues, you hear an outburst of a siren tee-tawing towards you from behind, with the tee-taws sounding compressed by the Doppler Effect as the vehicle approaches at some respectable speed. You take a glance at your rear view mirror and see a white Land Cruiser with the word “Ambulance” imprinted on its body, above the windscreen. You are able to read it without straining because, although it is in a wrong reading format on the vehicle, it is perfectly legible viewed through a mirror.

Instinctively you push to one side to give way to the ambulance, which is obviously in a hurry to deliver some patient at a health facility. Time is of the essence to the driver and to the medical personnel attending to the patient. To everybody’s disbelief, the ambulance jumps the red traffic lights a few metres away, and resolutely pushes on past the almost stationary vehicles on the queue.

At the round-about ahead of you, the ambulance goes to the right and circles the round-about using the less-congested right lane as there are fewer vehicles going in the opposite direction.

The tee-taws now sound further apart, again due to the Doppler Effect, as the ambulance recedes into the distance. The patient gets to the hospital in the knick of time and life is saved.

Did the ambulance break traffic rules? Of course, it did, but in the lofty demands placed upon ambulances, observance of traffic rules pales into insignificance when duty calls. An ambulance driver behaves like a (wo)man possessed when he/she is on duty.

 A deadly bombshell was unleashed in 2019. Starting with Wuhan in China the novel diseases now called Covid-19 spread to all corners of the earth like a fire in the dry savannah, leaving untold devastation in its wake. The victims were initially counted in thousands, then hundreds of thousands and eventually in millions. What is even more unsettling is that those who have succumbed would have been near perfect health just a few days earlier. Agreed, most of them have hand underlying conditions, but they were living with those conditions and managing them.

Something had to be done, and quickly so, to stop the merciless and unforgiving carnage. Scientists worked literally around the clock to try and find a solution to the pandemic. Like in the case of ambulance drivers breaking traffic rules, some protocols had to be dispensed with to redeem time. Ordinarily, vaccines take up to 10 years before they are certified to be safe for general use. We did not have that luxury. In 10 years, almost the entire human population could easily be decimated going at the rate the pandemic has been condemning people to the grave. If it takes 10 years to wait for a Covid-19 vaccine, that vaccine will be useless as there will hardly be anybody left to administer it on.

Some misguided enthusiasts have gone on a crusade to portray Covid-19 vaccines in very poor light, partly on them having been developed in an unprecedented short period. A bunch of terror mongers these people.

Some of the people have carefully spiced up their mongery in religious anecdote. They try to show their mastery of apocalypic literature, and fill the ears of their hearers with the invention that Covid-19 vaccines are a deliberate ploy to introduce a substance into people that will enable the rulers of the New World Order to control them. Once you get vaccinated, so they claim, you enter their radar and they will push you around like chess players. They claim to have discovered the fulfilment of the Revelator’s 666 code in Covid-19 vaccines.

It is an exercise in futility to wrap Covid-19 vaccines in religious dogma, as the vaccines will surely prevail while the warpped interpretation of scripture will fall away. The truth is that the world needs these vaccines, and needs them now. They are the result of well-meaning men and women working to save the world from the jaws of the pandemic.

Search within the communities that have been vaccinated already and appreciate the positive impact vaccines are bringing.