I told myself a few weeks ago that I was no longer going to write this chapter. I am not the morality police, nor am I a pharmacist; so by the time anyone reads this, hopefully it will have been heavily fact-checked and edited. Aspects like coherence and contrivance should overcome disbelief despite the fact I'm writing this while watching Joe Rogan, listening to Stuff You Should Know and Kygo, three days after being discharged from a mental hospital. Now I'm listening to music, I believe that's important for mental health.
The problem with a low-risk, highly contagious virus is...
What do "unintended consequences" mean to you? My wife works in a pharmacy. She told me when the flu virus came out this year, less people volunteered to get it despite the free gift card with which it came. Now she says her pharmacy is on par with normal, it just took one extra week. How could that be? This is an example of what I would call an unintended consequence, or it simply could be a coincidence.
Why would any sane person refuse $10 in exchange for a flu vaccine during a pandemic? Why would any sane person be committed to a mental hospital?Why would any sane person refuse free money? Because even vaccines have a causal sphere of morality and ethics, although many people might not realize it.
The coronavirus vaccine is going to take a while to produce. This book will in all possibility be published before a vaccine is distributed to everyone in the world. This could be because of synesthesia and Fourier Transforms (just trust me on this, or ask an systems engineer or look it up yourself, be my guest); but even if we rushed the development of the vaccine and it came out tomorrow, it will not be enough for everyone in the world to safely go outside. People will still die of coronavirus well into the future.
We need to consider the economics of scale, or really just the concept of scale itself. Most experts agree that the coronavirus vaccine will require two injections. There are over 7 billion people in the world. In order to get just the "most wealthy" countries completely vaccinated overnight, it would require an absolute shit-show. Two stages multiplied by America's needed vaccination rate could be over half a billion doses of vaccine. Even if we could produce that overnight, imagine how many people would want to get it in 2020. Now imagine, as I am writing this, how many people would want access to it tomorrow. The car accidents and traffic jams alone would, or at least could, erase every single life saved by the vaccine. Or maybe they wouldn't; I'm not an expert on vaccines.
Back to the ethics of COVID-19, it appears that experts are trying to speed up the vaccination process as much as possible. One of the ways they can do this is by overlapping the different phases of trials while doing everything in their power to analyze it's safety on humans. The best way to shave time off the process is to purposely infect those who are low risk of having complications, even after having a new vaccine. This is the twisted way to test the safety of a vaccine on humans rapidly, and no one wants to do it other than millennials with no dependents or preexisting conditions. This is called a "human challenge trial".
There's a problem however: millennials will do ANYTHING to help save the world, even if it puts them at risk. Institutions however, such as universities, are very resistant to rapid change especially at the hands of the young. The producers of the vaccine know exactly the risk involved, maybe even less than 0.01%, but they don't know if the vaccine will work or how to best treat those infected with the virus. A human challenge trial of this proportion may require thousands upon thousands of young people to test. Do the math on your own, 10,000 x 0.01%. It's one. If the vaccine fails, then statistically one person may be volunteering their own death. That is a big fucking moral dilemma for Oxford University and millennials like me.
There are already tens of thousands of willing young people who've already potentially signed their life away. Including me, and I'm not too worried about it.
Let's talk about language, Cockney Rhyming Slang and duress words to be specific. (Fair trigger warning: this part may be harder to read if you've been effected by mental health or suicide). My wife and I have a secret to a happy marriage; it's honest communication. There, the big secret of the book is out of the bag and hopefully you still want to know more.
Cockney Rhyming Slang originates from the east side of London. It has a very interesting logic to it; it's way easier to just go through examples of it until it makes sense. The term "fart" becomes translated to "blowing rapsberries", because fart rhymes with "raspberry tart". Yes, that is how it works. The first word relates to the second word which rhymes with the original word, but the rhymed word can get lost in translation and dropped over time. This makes it very difficult for linguists to track certain English slang terms, much like Egyptian hieroglyphs prior to cracking the Rosetta Stone.
My wife and I use a similar system. In fact, we always joke that if we were trapped on a deserted island somewhere, with everything we needed but connection to the outside world, our language would devolve into complete nonsense. We've noticed this by what we call our cats, but also how we communicate with each other.
One night in college while we were in bed watching Pokemon on our Roku, we discovered a little devil named "Pignite". Pignite, obviously a portmanteau of Pig and Ignite, evolves from "Tepig" which essentially means lukewarm. The logic was so clear, we stole it. To this day, we still will not fall sleep angry. And we never fall asleep before saying "Pignite, I love you (too:)". It was perfect, so what happened that fucked it all up?
I was checked into a mental institution involuntarily, and we were very close to running out of genuine duress words. That's a problem no one should have.
A duress word is a covert distress signal used by an individual who is being coerced by one or more hostile persons. It is used to warn others that they are being forced to do something against their will. It's something slight enough that it can be slipped into normal conversation, but obvious that your own wife will react very problematically if she ever hears it.
But it's not always bad, it can be a code for how well things are going. It can convey happiness in secret, like when your in-laws are driving you nuts and you're trying not to burst out laughing. A good duress word can mean anything, only you get to decide.
It will work. Every. Single. Time. If you've taken the effort and time to think of 2-3 codes that you and your spouse will never forget, you can always safely communicate; even while in a mental institution. For some people that is very important.
One of our words was Pigday, it essentially meant "have a good trip to the store!" Like rhyming slang, we've absolved the word of all original logic. It's a great duress word for positivity. Although we can't use it anymore, because I just wrote it down. We'll still use it though, and we'll come up with new words soon.
You probably should too. You never know when it will come in handy.
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