Biology is weird. I found out that people who run a lot, like me, have much lower incidences of skin cancer than people who don’t run, which is kind of odd. Runners are outside all of the time. Our exposure to the elements, and the sun, should keep that rate level or make it rise, right?
Then again regular exercise helps boost the immune system. So there’s that. Then this happened: After a physical my doctor told me that I had low vitamin D and prescribed a supplement for me. She also told me that it was common for runners to have low vitamin D, which we shouldn’t get from being out in the sun all of the time, right? Go figure.
The point is biology and the mechanisms of nature are complex, complicated, and weird. With the Covid-19 pandemic social media is sick with articles about how the disease ticks. One article hypothesized that the high rate of death among men, (Some places report as much as 60% to 70% of those who die from Coronavirus are male,) is from the higher rate of smoking among men, making them more susceptible to the disease. Then another article comes out about how smokers have a stronger immune response to Covid-19. So which is it?
A lot of people take reports like these at face value. The fact of the matter is, right now, what they don’t know about this disease is much more than what they do know. Set conclusions about how smoking affect Covid-19 are just premature. And they do know some things without knowing why: They do not know why children seem to have a high resistance to the disease. Children get it a lot less often, and when they do get sick from it the majority of kids with Covid-19 have mild symptoms. Researchers come up with ideas for why that is so, but they have no concrete facts to rest on in this case. At least not yet.
What really baffle researchers at this point is that they do not know why there are so many wildly different outcomes of the disease. Many people who contract Coronavirus are asymptomatic, while others die from it, some get really sick and then recover, and other have mild illnesses from the disease, sometimes to the point where they just thought they had the flu or a head cold. In a nutshell, they still do not know how Coronavirus kills people.
I’m not an epidemiologist or a biologist, but I do nerd out on the sciences to the point where I know much more about biology that the average Jane Doe or John Six Pack. Even so, I had my epidemiology education when I read Randy Shilts’ book And The Band Played On, his book about the beginning and spread of the AIDS epidemic.
When AIDS first came to light as a disease it baffled the hell out of the medical community. It started out with mysterious cases of patients with depressed immune systems which came to the attention of the CDC. Back then the CDC stockpiled drugs specifically designed to treat people with depressed immunities. They started getting many requests from many different doctors for these drugs, but the doctors were not indicating what kind of disease or medical conditions that their patients had, which was part of the request process. Researchers at the CDC realized something new was brewing when they contacted one of the doctors to find out why he had not filled out his patient’s medical condition. That doctor informed them that he didn’t indicate what kind of medical condition was crashing his patient’s immune system because he and his colleagues had no idea what the patient was suffering from.
The alarm bells started going off when they discovered that many of the people who were suffering from this new disease were healthy young men, at least men who were healthy before they started suffering under the strain of whatever it was that was making them sick. Even worse, many of them were dying from terminal cases of a skin disease, Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a disease that usually wasn’t fatal. It took a lot of work and research before they realized what was going on, that HIV was eating people’s T-Cells, which was how it attacked the immune system.
HIV was, at first, a bizarre and unprecedented malady. Right now we’re dealing with another pandemic, one which is very different from HIV, but no less baffling.
So many people have given so many confident opinions on what Covid-19 is, how it operates, how to prevent and treat it, who it strikes, and what it does. Many an armchair biologist have given me their opinions which they state as facts. But I know enough to know that the facts are still being sifted through, research is still feeling around, and doctors are doing their best to make sense of a disease that still has yet to reveal enough about itself for us to fight it head on, rather than trying to trap it with lockdowns and social distancing.
The HIV epidemic could have been contained, it could have been halted by the simplest of social distancing measures which was simply safe sex and education, as well as more aggressive civil and corporate measures. But it was allowed to run rampant: By the medical industry, by the United States Government, and by an indifferent society who still suffered from one of the most wretched of diseases of all: Cultural homophobia.
HIV was never a gay disease, just as Covid-19 is not an Asian disease. Boneheaded prejudices will not help stem the pandemic, nor will the cold-blooded policies of conservatives leaders who think the general public needs to throw themselves into the maw of a pandemic so they can still make their money.
The battle against HIV had a rocky and languid start, because it was distorted and warped to be a “gay” disease. Covid-19 has turned into a class issue. Who cares if some more working class people have to die? As long as the economy keeps going. Because when CEOs and Republican leaders talk about sacrificing some for the good of all, (That is, the economy,) they aren’t talking about sacrificing themselves. They are talking about sacrificing people like you, like me, like our friends and family. They are not the ones who have to risk their health and their lives by shutting down lockdowns and forcing people back to work.
The lesson this book can teach us: What it really means to research and fight a new and widespread disease, and how prejudice can fan the flames of an epidemic.
Because fighting a disease is not like filling out a crossword puzzle, or researching a term paper: It means treading new ground with twists and turns and riddles, into a maze that can change itself without warning. It’s a fight for sure, and it’s not going to be won by jumping the gun on cures or assumptions by people hungry for a quick and easy solution. And it will only get worse with blind prejudice which threaten to make this pandemic even worse, at least in the United States, which has already suffered from too much needless death and suffering under yet another indifferent and incompetent Republican administration.
Reagan never cared about dying AIDS patients, because so many of them were gay. Trump and his lackeys don’t care about so many people dying from Coronavirus, because the people who are dying of this disease are beneath him. A hard lesson in history repeating itself.
Buy it. Read it. Learn from it.
