Anna Buckley (2021) The Life Scientific Virus Hunters.

A foreword by Jim Al-Khali inform the reader this is the third book in which leading scientist and engineers are interviewed and their responses recorded for Radio 4.

Few of us are going to shout at the radio (or its contemporary equivalent) about the origins of our universe but when it comes to viruses and Covid-19, in particular, conspiracy theorist think they know better than the experts here.

I always go with whatever Father Ted thinks.

Dealt a pack of cards, I’m told to pick one. The teller tells me the card I picked shows I’m a complete sucker. For another £50, she can tell me more of how much a sucker I am. For £100 I can shuffle the pack and we’re back to where we started: I’m a complete sucker.

Not daft enough to advice his followers to inoculate themselves with an injection of disinfectant or buy his latest book the Bible or Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is interesting. Because it doesn’t really exist. Yet the vast computing power to create its non-existence is done more efficiently be viruses.

Viruses are ‘100 000 times smaller the full stop at the end of this sentence’.  They endlessly mutate in the same way that Bitcoins use a long string of useless algorithms to demonstrate uselessness in action, which means they have a purpose.

We can’t blame bats for being batty, or monkeys for monkeying around or birds contacting avian flu.  Outbreaks of disease are more likely to occur when we push up against and into their worlds. Typically, they find a way to infect domesticated animals. The homo sapiens (wise ones) were asked for a comment but declined to answer.  

Ironically, 250 000 pigs a day were not being slaughtered in processing plants in America. And in 2020, world headlines focused on the 17 million mink culled in Denmark (Like the little pigs, they weren’t going to be living happily ever after, anyway).   

Instead we scape not goats but scientists. Even although as a group they saved our civilised world, when people started dying from a new virus in Wuhan around 2019 for which there was no cure.

Conspiracy theorists were keen to use that new labour saving device, The Aye, But argument developed in Scotland.

My bible here is Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World. Read Chapter 10, ‘The Dragon In My Garage’. Or if you have a mind to, Chapter 14, ‘Antiscience’. (In fact read the whole book).

The Aye, But argument has the same logic as ‘The Dragon in My Garage’.

Nothing is verifiable but a credulous mind. Even that is in doubt, especially when you’ve met my mate Laughing Boy.

‘Where’s the dragon?’ the narrator asks when he looks into the garage.

It’s invisible and especially invisible to disbelievers.

Similarly, Covid-19 is invisible, but only visible to believers.

‘You propose spreading flour…to capture the dragon’s footprints.’

‘Then use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.’

‘Spray paint the dragon to make her visible?’

Similarly, Covid-19 either didn’t exist, wasn’t measureable in any physical way, or just a bad flu. Certainly not wearing face masks and following scientific advice wasn’t going to work because of the Aye, But argument that you knew best.

Science is both a body of knowledge and a continuing argument that we don’t know best. Listen out and listen in to the next superhero movie. You’ve got the biggest pair of ba’s in the world, but with great power comes great responsibility. Something like that is the advice the superhero will be given.

Science is not superhuman. It is too human. But here’s the buzz. It doesn’t ask you to not question. Science is a way of working and developing questions that are measureable and can be validated or answered.  Always question. Scepticism is part of the took-kit.

Specialists in the Virus Hunters series ask questions. They propose tentative answers that can be duplicated (if it can’t be duplicated it’s not validated).

Covid-19 vaccines worked because of their recognition of the importance of genome sequencing. Developing antibodies. Antibody-based treatments. Creating a global map of disease hotspots. Mathematically modelling and predicting. Containing and stopping, until the next one, which is more likely because nothing really changed, did it?

Laughing Boy doesn’t read so I’m exempt from his laughing at me.

I’m not going to test that argument. Aye, But…

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