Hello 2022, you can be better than your two predecessors

By ELSIE EYAKUZE

Greetings, 2022. Welcome. What a nice, round, plumptious number you are. A lot of repetition going on there, duality, divisible by two.

You are quite evocative and this implies a promise of good things to come during your duration.

In that vein, I have notes for you. I am utterly uninterested in what your two predecessors brought to the table: a lot of Covid-19.

Truth be told, nobody is interested in the pandemic anymore. We need to figure out how to live with it for the foreseeable future. I think you can do better than your predecessors.

I have been keeping up with the news over the holidays to see what is known and unknown about the epidemic.

I am becoming a little bit worried that we have no idea what we are doing. Of course, medical sciences are not perfect. We are smart, and yet we are nowhere near knowing as much as we wish we did about the human body.

Years of “prevention is better than cure” style healthcare around the world has made us forget the fact that nature is in charge and She is always several steps ahead of us.

Hubris set in.

Modern medicine

I admit, I was part of the problem. A faithful believer in modern medicine, I thought we would beat this bug quickly. The new technologies that gave us vaccines within a year of the discovery of the Covid-19 virus cemented my belief that we would have this under control in no time.

After all, I have been the beneficiary of preventive medicine since babyhood: vaccinated against a range of diseases and comfortably clueless about the perils of the viral and bacterial world out there.

I honestly thought this would come down to a simple exercise of vaccine dissemination and prevention measures against infections that we would all adhere to.

I forgot that we are human.

To say that things have gone sideways would be quite the understatement. En mass, people really cannot be entrusted with our own wellbeing. Good grief, we are stupid. The uptake of good Covid prevention practices has been shockingly difficult considering how many of us have access to water for hand-washing and to materials for masking.

To make things worse, a number of parties have decided to actively resist Covid prevention measures and are busy disseminating untruths and misinformation.

And it is working! When it comes to the vaccine in particular, the dangers that have been linked to getting it are inventive.

My favourite is the implication that vaccination will affect men’s virility.

We all know this is a sure-fire way to get men all over the world and certainly African men to run away screaming. I don’t know what it says about us that we would rather live potentially shortened lives and fornicate with confidence than risk losing “manpower” via a jab.

Quality over quantity? This fear of a tiny prick on the part of our men bears further investigation.

Speaking of vaccinations, the people who own the patents aren’t sharing information that would decentralise the manufacturing process and increase access and affordability.

It is deplorable.

We both know what I think about the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime around the world, and the particular scrupulousness of the Americans and the slightly subtler Europeans.

Yes, everyone is at fault but does everyone suffer as much as Africans do from this scourge? No, sir, they do not.

If ever there was a time to punch through these racist barriers in knowledge, this would be it.

So, having brought you up to date a little bit, here are a few requests.

New thing

First of all, let us talk about variants. I understand that we are engaged in an arms race with Mother Nature and every day she throws a new thing at us.

She seems to be conceding a little bit with slightly less deadly variants but the virulence has gone up. I don’t trust her, she’s always up to something. If it please you, ask her to be kind.

Second, I understand social Darwinism, but I struggle to balance this against my wish for all of humanity to prosper. Maybe make us all a bit smarter while you are around? Talk to the men, especially — and the nurses.

Third, fire upon the IPR regime. The time is now to declare war on Big Pharma in the name of social justice, health and good sense.

We will revisit the topic during your tenure, I have a few ideas.

Lastly, bring a big cooler of chillness with you. We could all benefit from calm, balance and recovery time. If you can absorb shock for the 12 months of your tenure it will be appreciated.

That is pretty much it.

Come on in, and high five 2021 on its way out the door.

Keep it copacetic, twenty twenty two, and you just might join the ranks of cool numbers like Tree Fiddy and Four Twe… I mean Fourteen Ten.

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report: E-mail: [email protected]