It’s Life, Jim, but Not as We Knew It

KSK

The rain continues in my neck of the woods.  So far, four days and nights of non-stop rain and thick fog that blankets the area, and I cannot see the boundary.  It could be a metaphor for the confusion and uncertainty that are obscuring the country.  The landscape is clouded with lockdown insecurity and unrealistic vaccination targets that will likely see us in the same terrible holding pattern through to 2022, as the promised “borders will be open by Christmas” became, a day later, “borders may well still be closed by Christmas.” We cannot trust or rely on any announcements made by this tricky Government – more tricky than the virus, it seems.

The perilous state of our socio-economic reality is overlaid with the political miasma of unrealistic and surely unachievable vaccination targets, traffic lights, passports and papers – and the end of life as we knew it.  All of this swirls around common sense and reality.  We are trapped within a weather event that is becoming daily more stressful and difficult, and that is apparently a never-ending story.

Without travel between regions, let alone the rest of the world, we remain cut off from employment, family, opportunity, and the classifieds of life, the births, deaths and marriages.  But we are unable to meet the Government’s changing satisfaction levels.  Enough is never enough.  What will they require after the 90% mandate?

The verb, to satisfice, is a decision-making process that relates, among other disciplines, to human behaviour’s social science.  It strives for adequate rather than perfect results. The term was coined by American scientist and Nobel-laureate Herbert Simon in 1956 and remains valid today.

Our Government is requiring unrealistic results that exceed the boundaries of anticipated and predicted human behaviours.  A 90% vaccination goal is aiming for perfection. A goal that cannot be achieved leaves us existing in a fog of despair with no clear path out or forward.

The PM’s much-vaunted traffic light system has been panned by a workshop of thirty experts tasked with reviewing it.  They have stated that “getting Auckland to Green would not be possible…in the foreseeable future.” And, “it needs to be based on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and explicitly state saving Maori lives as a goal,” as reported by Sapeer Mayron, Stuff, 23 October.

Our PM uses fear to drive the vaccination campaign—using it as a crude separator between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated to create two different classes of people.

She ignores the scholarly articles of studies carried out on predictive behaviours of vaccination uptake in other pandemics such as the much earlier Swine Flu. Instead, she continues to use this blunt instrument to drive her response.  Even if her coercion does achieve the result she wants what about the effects of loneliness and isolation, depression, fear of the future, economic fragility and lost employment? Not to mention the impacts of disrupted education, increased health risks via alcohol and food consumption, reduced medical and surgical procedures, increasing domestic violence, suicides, and despair, along with anger and frustration.  The immune system does not perform well under stress, and each of these issues has a dampening impact on the immune response.

The vaccination programme does not consider the psychological, social and behavioural influences that can and do affect vaccination uptake, let alone the immune system response.  A jab in the arm or three is not a predictor of immune response efficacy.   The more fear that is created, the less effective is the immune response.  And we know, too, that the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine diminishes over a short time.  So at what point is 90% actually 90%?  100% of nothing is still nothing.

Gemma Tognini, on October 24 in The Australian, reports that “fear requires zero skill and absolutely no effort” and that “leaders who stoke fear sow division eventually reap the whirlwind.”  Our PM would be wise to take note of that.

Many years ago, long before Covid became a global phenomenon, I had recurring nightmares that I would be unable to see my children.  I had a terrible feeling that something was going to happen worldwide that would prevent me from being able to get to them and that would prevent them from being able to get to me. That recurring nightmare is now a terrifying reality.