So, enemy, we meet at last
Isqueeze four drops into the little well and watch the raspberry coloured fluid surge along the runnel. It fades to leave a single line and then, faintly but unmistakably, a second one. ‘‘Oh hello,’’ I say, ‘‘so this is it. We meet at last, illustrious thing.’’
And it is indeed an illustrious thing. It’s no older than a toddler, but it’s more famous than Jesus and more widely travelled than Attenborough. It’s ended the lives of millions of human beings and disrupted the lives of billions. And now we’ve become entwined as host and guest.
The thing evolved, as far as we know, in the guts of a Chinese bat. Then the bat went to market and the thing was off to the races.
As soon as we heard of the thing in New Zealand we pulled up the drawbridge and manned the ramparts and stood facing outwards, the team of five million, ready with pikes and vats of boiling oil. The thing would never get through.
The thing coughed politely, tried not to laugh, nudged and nuzzled at the barriers, unresenting, endlessly patient, and got through. Suddenly it was at our backs, breeding, proliferating. There was nothing to do but admire it and submit. And now the thing from Wuhan has found its way up my street, my drive and my nose. I’m partly relieved. It’s good to sniff the enemy at last.
The thing’s great stroke of good fortune was to evolve to infect human beings. For we too evolved from a single point of origin and then multiplied and spread everywhere, so the thing’s just piggybacked on our success.
Both of us are playing the game of evolutionary survival, which is why the thing should be on every syllabus. It tells us all about ourselves.
It shows us how vulnerable we are, how contingent. For all our apparent sophistication and for all our technological advance, we are still part of the animal world. What bats can catch so can we. Moreover we have not eliminated chance. And we won’t, because the process of evolution on which all life depends, including our own, is founded on it.
As a species we pride ourselves on science. And, within a year of the advent of the thing, we had developed vaccines. It was a magnificent achievement. But most of us have no idea how the science works. The boffins we depend on are few, and we pay them far less than their due.
In the United States, the most technologically advanced society on Earth, millions rejected the vaccines. They preferred God or horse wormer. It was an extraordinary business.
The US’S leading expert in public health, Dr Anthony Fauci, who has devoted his long life to the wellbeing of his fellow citizens, has become hunted by some of those same citizens. He has to employ a security detail. And we claim to be the rational species.
The thing exposed many leaders as frauds. Prime among those was the idiot Trump. ‘‘Slow the testing down,‘’ he pleaded at one point, on the principle that if you don’t look for something it isn’t there. The price of his idiocy was hundreds of thousands of extra deaths.
Even with three shots of vaccine the thing is not a joy to be with. My symptoms are aching bones, a searing cough and a loss of interest in the All Blacks squad.
But I am confident that with the help of Ibuprofen and a little Johnnie Walker I’ll pull through, to return to a life of delusion and the blind will of a Darwinian world.