Magic, or No Magic?

This is going to be a complicated post.

First off, my new story, about the romance between an African American girl and an Elf (tentatively titled the girl with the pretty eyebrows): a chunk of it is available for reading on one of the pages of this blog.  It was easy to get started with, but not to continue with, I'm afraid.

Secondly, I have a bit of a political idea to air, though I will try not to offend any of the political folders into which people have grouped themselves.  Here goes.

We all learn a little biology, a little botany, a little physics, a little chemistry, and so on, in school.  But, since the time of Aristotle, you can guess that the volume of science that mankind knows, and the volume of science that ordinary people are expected to know, has absolutely exploded.  Aristotle would be amazed at how much we know.  But I'm willing to take a guess that, long before the stage at which our teachers expect us to top out, we've already experienced a combination of emotional overload, as well as information overload, and we let the information come in through one ear, and out through the other.  It's mostly because we're kids (this all happens around the age of about 14) and we also buy into the idea that we can't afford to remember all this, especially because we're unlikely to ever use it.  Then, BOOM!  We're in the middle of a pandemic, and people are expecting for us to use all this 9th-grade knowledge that we have so carefully prevented ourselves from absorbing.  What we do is think of all the stuff that happens inside gadgets we use as being slightly magical.  We think of microwave ovens as being slightly magical; we think of air fryers as being slightly magical (actually, it's just a low-powered blowtorch), we think of our smart phones as being magical, etc.  Some phone companies encourage this belief.  But we are accustomed to thinking about vaccines sort of as though they're magic.

And worse, this new vaccine works in a more hi-tech way, using genetics.

Now, genetics does not have to mean tinkering with our own DNA.  A few years ago, I went on a reading spree about genes and DNA, and I found that the vast majority of things that our DNA does, is to manufacture proteins.  The proteins go along our bloodstream, and do all the things that need to be done, like get a baby started, or repair a tear somewhere, etc.  But one family of tasks can't be done with a single protein.  This task is fight infections!  To fight infections, popping out a single protein won't do, because all mammals are really designed to fight diseases---which means bacteriums---that they haven't seen before.  Of course.  There's no point in fighting only familiar diseases, because an unfamiliar one is sure to come along any day.

So what the DNA does is generate disease-fighting "machines", that modify themselves to fight new germs.  One of them meets a new germ, and learns how to fight it, and spreads the word to the other "machines",  and the war is on.  Be assured that these "machines" are not part of our DNA; they are one step removed.

The new vaccines capitalize on this process, to make these machines more efficient.  They teach those machines to defeat one of those spikes that the COVID virus has.  But the spike has enough information in it for the "machines" that get hold of it to destroy the entire virus, so, yes: there's a little bit of spike in the vaccine, as I understand it.  But the spike itself is harmless; it's the rest of the virus that hijacks our lung cells, and forces them to generate more viruses.

It's a sneaky, mean little virus, but the best weapon against it are our own virus-fighting machines, and the vaccine is a sort of Coach, that helps them learn to fight the virus.  Now, because I am not sure how much microbiology you have picked up, and sadly, the science teachers in different schools teach their students wildly different amounts of science, some folks are going to be able to understand what I'm saying (behind the strange anthropomorphizations that I have described).   Some of you might be affronted at having to pull out all that dusty information that you hoped never to have to use again.  But this vaccine is such an effective piece of chemistry, despite the tiny number of people who get the infection even after being vaccinated, that it is sad that there are so many who reject the vaccine.

A lot of people reject much of the science behind other things as well, such as Climate Change, and Election Security.  They have long ago relegated science to the same box as Miracles, and Magic, and they feel that rejecting science is a cousin of rejecting magic.  Rejecting magic is good, right?

But rejecting the vaccine is not a partisan choice, except that Pres. Biden promised to end the pandemic in so many days.  GOP leaders are waiting to mark down this failure to end the pandemic as a win for them.  But a win for the GOP leaders would seem to be a huge loss for the GOP rank-and-file, because their seniors, and their kids are going to suffer.  There were even some politicians who, in a weak moment, said that their seniors were tough enough to take a little hardship on behalf of The Cause.  That's just plain foolish, and I'm not going to write any more about that sort of testosterone-speak.

Added Later:  It is beginning to emerge that distrust of vaccines, in some people, is based on the belief that they are not safe, or that they are not effective.  The three major vaccines are incredibly safe, and amazingly effective.  Any of you "Don't tell me what to do" types, who are jealous of your freedom, ought to get vaccinated anyway.  It is going to become difficult to get anything done if you don't.  I'm not going to list arguments for getting vaccinated here; it's a waste of time, since those who are determined not to get vaccinated could still invent an argument not to get it.