A new type of religion

The realities of the day determine the general attitude of the individual which later fan out into the public sphere. We have lived the reality of a pandemic these past nine months and it seems Covid-19 is not going away anytime soon. There are many conspiracy theories being born out of the confusion bred by the airborne virus, and their number is increasing with each passing day. This is not unnatural, for where the enemy seems to come from all sides, the masses scatter in confusion as the citizens of Troy were the night Achilles’ Myrmidons and Menelaus’ Spartan (Mycenaean) armies tore them from within. The reality of the moment is that we have a virus in our midst, and the social and economic havoc it has wreaked far outweighs the statistics of the dead. Many a moment one sits musing on John Steinbeck’s Depression Era account The Grapes of Wrath, not because of the increasing poverty, but because of the unfolding reality that this disease will leave us more scattered than we were before it came. It is a cold season that awaits us this time around with the pandemic entering its second phase. The results are going to be worse than anything we have seen before, because the poor are going to get poorer and with their poverty the levels of crime are going to increase. White collar crimes, blue collar crimes and any other types of crime are sure to increase as desperation levels increase. When Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng made his prayer and was attacked for it, the reality is that he may have been telling the truth; he may have been misinterpreted by those who have made Covid-19 a new type of religion: burning everyone who dares question the attitudes around its handling on the social media stakes. An SABC News article quotes his prayer: “I lock out every demon of COVID-19. I lock out any vaccine that is not of you. If there be any vaccine that is of the devil, meant to infuse 666 in the lives of people, meant to corrupt your DNA, any such vaccine, Lord God Almighty, may it be destroyed by fire.” This prayer is supported by Reverend Kelvin Harris, who leads the Bosmont Congregational Church. He says: “And this is where I agree with Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. COVID-19 is holding the world in its grip. No person, no company, no group, no nation can benefit millions of billions of rand from any vaccine, otherwise such vaccine is from the devil.” The words of the judge may sound as if they are religious mantras, but the reality of the matter is that almost everyone in this world holds some type of religious affiliation. Whether pledging allegiance to some stone god or Jehovah, Buddha, Allah, a bird or a tree, religion has always turned out to support the Marxist notion that religion is the opium of the masses. In a time of great pain, everyone needs a shot of some morphine, a derivative of the opium poppy in a literal or figurative sense, and this time around people are looking for some salve to soothe the anguish of the pain the realities that came with the pandemic have brought into the social sphere. People are in reality tired of living life under ‘the new normal’, in fact, the oppression brought by medical disasters has taken its toll on humanity in the last 200 years without repose. From the Spanish flu of the World War One era to smallpox, the polio, the crabs, gonorrhea, syphilis, Ebola, to AIDS, it has been one long fight with medical failures. Medicine as a profession has effectively failed to deal with disease outbreaks since the beginning of what one can term as ‘the pharmaceutical era’ where provision of treatment in the form of an annual or monthly vaccine or medicine doses is considered an option that is better than providing the cure. There are in reality far too many medical lies hidden behind the bureaucracy of the profession. Anything and everything about medical malpractice is protected by idiosyncrasies peculiar to the profession that include doctor patient confidentiality, Hippocratic oaths, and other such lame defences aimed at convincing whoever is gullible enough that the doctors are hard at work trying to deal with a disease. The results attest to something different: doctors have in their quest for material wealth become ineffective agents of dealing with disease outbreaks. What have become fashionable are the new age over-the-counter medicines that make illegally humongous profits for pharmaceutical companies owned by the doctors themselves. The focus is on providing lifelong treatment for a given condition rather than to provide a single dose that just gets it over and done with when it comes to curing a disease. This COVID-19 thing is already spinning a lot of money for individual companies (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Glaxo-Smith Kline, Moderna, Biontech, and a host of others). It seems that the medical game is to ensure that the malaise drags for as long as possible to ensure that these pharmaceutical giants make as much as they can from the cure. It is true that one is not a medical professional, but the question remains: How could Edward Jenner fashion a vaccine for smallpox with the rudimentary technologies he had in the 1700’s, and ‘medical experts’ in an age (21st century) with such advanced technology fail to deal with a strain of flu? It is a ‘all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’ type of scenario where human beings from poorer regions will always be the last to receive assistance when dealing with their realities in their excluded world. Every other profession is questioned for its misdemeanours, but politics and medicine are hardly questioned for their failures, the former for its increasing levels of corruption, and the latter for its justified incompetence. Health is at the core of every individual’s life, the basic determinant of whether an individual can contribute to the running of society. This means that matters of health should be put at the forefront of every discussion; there is just no time for quacks to quack like ducks in a pool when it comes to the provision of any cure. This is to ensure that the economic base that lies in a society’s human base is healthy enough to deal with any challenges that come in the way of social progress. Humanity seems not to have progressed an inch ever since the day they decided that profit should be made out of everything, even life and health. When cures start being sold like sweets on every street corner, then we are bound to have a tribe of quacks selling their own concoctions without regard to the conventions. An October, 2006 letter by Laura Grande letter on medical ethics argues that: It is commonly believed that the way in which a disease enters and interacts with the body must be understood in order for a treatment for an illness to be discovered. Is there a completely ethical way to discover a disease’s natural process in the body when, in order to find it, no treatment can be given to an infected individual? Many would argue that this is ethical as long as no proven treatment exists to help the ailing person and the person knowingly agrees to participate in the research. The moral soundness of this process is surely altered, however, when a treatment that has been proven effective at combating the disease becomes available. At this point, it becomes a moral obligation of those monitoring the disease’s process through the body to provide the “subjects” with the proper medication. Medication that deals with only a part of the disease is in my layman terms improper because it then leaves the patient with the burden of living next door to a monster that might snuff them out at any moment. It should be the credo of the profession to provide full cures and not these half-baked lab experiments that have turned a larger part of humanity into lab rats used to test individual company vaccines. It seems the name of the game with current medicine is to produce no cure but to provide only treatment. There are no cures around if you come to think of it, only treatments: look around if you do not agree. What this means is that we spend half our productive time worried about invisible disease instead of fashioning new ideas that could aid in the progress of our lives and the lives of our fellow community members. A human being worried about the poverty brought by the pandemic now has to constantly worry about coming across soldiers or the police without a mask. It was never the initial idea to get rid of the disease it seems: the idea was to get us worried enough to remain within control. The technocrat that is benefiting from the tenders will disagree, but not everyone is fooled by the Scaramouch panning out in front of our eyes: we are being herded into the arms of poverty in the name of medicine and disease. What the average politician does not know is that more 680 million people had to face poverty and starvation in 2019; 12% or more will face it during the course of the pandemic this year, meaning 89 to 100 million more people will face the full brunt of poverty and starvation according to a GAVI report. The reality is that government policy just gave in to the pandemic’s health demands and preventative measures without considering the socio-economic impacts the lockdowns as preventative measures would have. The average street vendor making a livelihood lost it in the middle of the pandemic’s lockdowns, the average company had to lay off workers to escape going under, and the entire Third World economy structure that is reliant on SMME economies crashed, perhaps never to rise again. In the middle of the flowery political speeches made in the name of pleasing the pharmaceutical lords, the political leadership has all but forgotten about the children of the vendors and low-to-middle income workers whose jobs have been lost without the promise of them being recovered. It is a bleak time ahead, and the precautionary measures are likely to be thrown out of the window as the hunger levels increase and the masses begin to face the reality hunger and poverty come with the disease. The loquacity with which we speak of things we hardly understand as Africans will lead to our ruin. There is talk about a second wave of the COVID-19; we hardly understand what the first actually meant. Running helter-skelter for tenders, the moneyed secret societies go on and begin to rev their fear machines for the sake of instilling fear in the masses. I personally do not think that fear of the unknown ever got anyone anywhere; the fear of what we know has the same effect. The latter is however a bigger sin when medical scientists and politicians behave as if science is supernatural or that a new strain of a known disease is so bad that it cannot be beaten by human resilience to the point of it being the monster that ate the entire human nations in history books. I guess the Spanish Flu pandemic is the worst after the Bubonic Plague of the Middle-Ages, and both were beaten: why then should we bow down before Covid with all the technology and scientific wisdom at our disposal? Perhaps it is time that Caesar has to be paid his dues as Jesus predicted over 2000 years ago. If it is so, then so Caesar be paid for the sake of the normal life we knew before the virus escaped out of the lab for some reason unknown. Grande speaks against the withdrawal of information from the subjects when it comes to medical research largely because information is what informs the subjects’ choice to comply or not to comply. We remain vague on the information about COVID-19 in this country and in reality only wear masks because some soldier or police officer was videotaped assaulting whoever was not complying with ‘regulations’. Such regulations are not considerate of vendors, low-skilled workers, migrant workers, vulnerable social groups and other poor people. It seems the goal is just to please master WHO protocols all the time without considering the livelihoods in name of the food packages handed out to the poor that do not seem to consider reality a whit. Grande states: Today, a rigorous protocol for human experimentation procedures is in place. It is now generally accepted that, for a research study involving human experimentation to be morally sound, it must include, ideally, the disclosure of all relevant information and must hold human life as most important (Bonnie 67). Merry Christmas, that is, if Christmas will be merry in the midst of a pandemic and the realities of hunger and starvation staring us in the face as a continent and part of the Third World. Merry ignorance, merry mind control to the government withholding information from us, merry covid hogwash. Tšepiso S. Mothibi