Nature Will Survive
Pte. James Brown was a driver at the Head Quarters of the 1st Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment (AKA The Prince of Wales Regiment). In 1913 while serving in Co. Cork he formed a strong bond with a shaggy haired Irish Terrier puppy who he named Prince, in keeping with the regiment’s name. Prince soon became a regimental groupie and would often accompany the men on their marches.
The historical behavior of Pathogens should have left little doubt that COVID-19 would mutate into either a more virulent or more fatal version. Now that the more virulent COVID-20 (if you will) mutations have emerged, we need to look ahead and guess at what 2021 might yield. There is a very real possibility that a new variant will emerge that is resistant to the current vaccinations.
For most of its existence Vietnam has been a poor agrarian society. Its farmers were content to boast of their rice paddies and water buffaloes. Between 111 BCE and 1427 CE Chinese warlords would invade, occupy and then be violently expelled from Vietnam four times. After the last expulsion, the country finally had a measure of peace and independence. Sadly, it was not to be for very long. As a bulwark against British expansion Eastward and to bolster their own colonial ambitions, the French made steady inroads into the region and in 1887 Vietnam and Cambodia were colonized to create French Indochina. Laos would be added in 1893 to complete the trio. The French had one main objective-to enrich themselves at the expense of the Vietnamese. To achieve this they plundered the natural resources of the country. Tin, coal, rice and rubber were exported and sold overseas. The farmers were robbed of their ancestral lands and forced to work for the benefit of French settlers. Worse still, they treated the Vietnamese with an indifferent brutality. Tens of thousands would die in the so-called cause of civilizing them. Any wonder that an underground resistance existed to expel the French.
Covid-19 is like any other living creature. It has the same compelling need to find a suitable environment to live in, and to perpetuate itself. Had it picked any other species for its host, it would have lived and died like dozens of its cousins we never hear of. For millennia, these viruses have kept a tight rein on the populations of the many species that inhabit our planet. If it wasn't for them, we would be scrambling to survive on a planet overrun with trillions of insects.
For any virus to stay in a single host is a death sentence. Either the host’s immune system will kill it, or it will kill the host and itself in the process. To live it must continuously jump to a new host. Within a host it will replicate itself and cough and sneeze itself onto any surface that is nearby, hoping for a new host to pick it up. In the wild, there are spatial boundaries that limit how far a virus can spread. A pox that destroys an ant colony may not be able to jump to an adjacent colony and will die out. Ebola will decimate an entire tribe of monkeys and then, because of the territorial separation between the tribes, will be forced to go dormant because a new host is not within its reach.
If we define a war as a conflict between two or more groups of combatants resulting in at least thirty thousand casualties we will find that during the 20th Century there were 51 wars. As most of them spanned a number of years, there was not a single year in the whole century when we were not killing each other - in large numbers - somewhere in our world.
In August 1959 a lonely, penniless and almost homeless Polish Jew died at a bus stop on 42nd Street in New York. Had he been just another desperate refugee from Hitler’s Germany his death would not be noteworthy. But he wasn’t. He was a renowned jurist and an authority on crimes against humanity.
