Politics, privilege, and science

And there we were three years ago in this very space. Contemplating, against some considerable odds, the triumph of science over politics and the vain folly that accompanies privilege.

One inspired moment had led to a hurried huddle at the Trinidad Hilton, led by CARPHA and an assemblage of journalists, to consider the threats and challenges of an encroaching pandemic.

We stood near the podium, about five of us, chuckling while considering appropriate non-touch greetings. Kiran offered ‘namaste’ and Carlon a light touch of knuckles. Already, the offer of a “virtual” event for greater reach – particularly to a somewhat sceptical bunch motivated by any of several factors that often emerge against the tides of scholarship.

Then came the news on Dr St John’s phone that a pandemic had been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO). So unfamiliar were some that everything from institutional jurisdiction to international membership to “virus” was quickly Googled and the room took on a different look and feel.

This, some of us thought then, was it. But those who felt protected by professional credentials, political status, or religious creed commenced the rigid erection of doubt and scepticism. I took the screenshots and recorded many of them in order to plot curves of conversion … if ever they occurred. In some instances, they never did. Even three years after. Even now.

This was to be nothing but a bad flu’ through which institutional, partisan, corporate, and geo-political advantage was to be gained. Its origins dark and dank out of a monster live and raw encroaching and extending tentacles intended to rebalance tentative equilibria of global power and influence.

Through the gates of misinformation, disinformation and old-fashioned ignorance came plots fast and furious. We, the small and weak, were to foot a tragic bill. A single government in a small twin-island state had conspired to shut itself off from the rest of the world in order to “protect” us little folks from an imaginary peril.

I was uncharacteristically compelled to publicly dispel absurd untruths. No, the rest of the Americas had not remained “open for business” while we closed. No, slavish obeisance to WHO dictate was not intended to impose a regime of needless caution. Caution was being interpreted as “panic” intended to reinforce control of all that officialdom purveys.

There were “sheep” everywhere. Led to slow torture. They, who claimed to unravel the plot, lay safely apart with all the appurtenances of privilege and advantage. But boxed in from outward flight, as is their wont at times of trouble. This time locked away through plandemic device and the designs of lesser mortals.

Such was the outflow of determined misguidance the global response found tacit expression in the public domain as contrived “overkill” with overwhelming consequences for vulnerable economies and the balance of power big and small.

Had science really prevailed over common sense? Had cold calculations in laboratories replaced warm passion and belief? Or could it just be that some were right and others outright wrong?

Having looked before at the contention science often attracts, much of it remained at least vaguely familiar. I had by then witnessed and recorded some of the more accessible scientific evaluations of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change and the accompanying crisis. Many, to today, do not accept the point.

Among them remain those in blissful denial who now lay claim to seamless association with COVID-scepticism and the accompanying unease over pandemic measures. One such advocate pointed repeatedly at the financial fractures being sustained and surmised that livelihoods outdid lives – particularly of the older, sicker, more expendable variety. Almost as if human circumstance routinely subjects itself to simple measures of bipolarity.

But surely, the plot is as deep as it has been wide. How far away, indeed, from contentions over the spherical dimensions of our planet? So much common space for anti-science/anti-proof and the sterile distance social and economic privilege accords.

After all, “don’t you know who I am?” At the vaccine site. At the hospital. At the table around which sit the poor, infirm, the young, the old, the heavily pigmented, those who will live and those condemned to die.

At the very end of this, if some finality were to ever come, we would likely have found that the triumph of science and proof has proven far more elusive than what is pronounced by some to be real or unreal. Put that way, nobody ends up winning.