Global food supply chains are collapsing. Clinical trials to combat COVID-19 mark the pace because people believe in fairy tales told by politicians and social media.
The only serious solution to the challenge of the pandemic is to let it circulate, albeit limited: so said it is scary, but it is true.
Meanwhile, the Government and the Regions plan our safety in the workplace and in everyday life on the basis of unnecessary temperature measurements. Infine, we are not sure that a vaccine will ever arrive nor can we delude ourselves about the timing. If you are strong spirits, fasten your seat belts and follow me in this short but important article.
You have read that in Italy farmers are alarmed because there are no more laborers to collect the products, nor is it clear how they will arrive. Well, the problem is global: Indian farmers prefer to give strawberries to cows instead of letting them rot, "because they can't transport fruit to city markets"1, while their Peruvian colleagues "unload tons of white cocoa to the landfill because the restaurants and hotels that would normally buy it are closed" and the North American ones (USA and Canada), "had to throw the milk away for the same reason". Identical what happens to fruit and dairy products in Egypt, where tourism is dead and cannot absorb them. At the same time, "legions of migrant workers from Eastern Europe and North Africa are trapped at the borders", instead of working as laborers on the farms of France, Germany and Italy. They cannot earn and so they have nothing to live on. The fear "that foreign workers may import cases of infection" is greater than the real risk that "crops will rot in the fields". In short, the rich do not let those who should feed them enter, the poor sink into misery.
All this happens because "We must love each other and think about health". In short, millions of people will starve and thousands will commit suicide out of desperation, but they will be very healthy.
Yes, being healthy is a beautiful thing, often a real illusion. And when you create an illusion, you kill an opportunity. Researchers who would like to test new combinations of old drugs or completely new drugs against coronavirus are well aware of this. "Speed is crucial in the hunt for COVID-19 treatments and a slowdown in clinical trials could cost many lives"2. Yet many people "They do not want to participate in clinical trials that would require giving up chloroquine treatments", whose politicians and social media falsely advertise the prodigious effects, without for now a solid clinically proven evidence. Perhaps the real disease is in the brain: it is the intelligence of many that is asymptomatic.
Speaking of symptoms, the prestigious magazine The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a study3 under which 56% of the guests infected in a nursing home were asymptomatic. Likewise, over 50% of passengers in the Diamond Princess, then positive test results, were asymptomatic4. Asymptomatic does not mean that they had a fever and no other symptoms but that they also had a normal body temperature.
We also want to add that the "guns" that should measure the temperature to workers, operators and customers they are the least suitable instrument to detect feverish people, due to the fact5 to be outrageously inaccurate and unreliable? Yet our authorities persist in issuing decrees and ordinances in which, in spite of the ridicule, they order "The detection, by staff, of the body temperature of customers and commercial operators ... with 'inhibition' of access for those with a temperature equal to or greater than 37,5 ° C"6.
Equally "hot" is the climate on social media against virologist and microbiologist Ann Vossen, in the Netherlands a real authority on the matter, who simply had the courage to tell the truth, to an audience ready to drink all the illusions, but reluctant to the truth: “Children become infected with each other but develop only mild symptoms and then, at home, they could infect dad or mom, hoping that they too will develop mild symptoms. Instead, it would be better to keep people considered at risk in a sort of cocoon, and who could be seriously ill "7.
At this point, usually, there is the rise of shields of what I ironically call "terrapiattisti": Health - say these beautiful souls - it comes before the economy, before education etc. Yes, too bad that in a world with tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of deaths from hunger or social conflict, good health would also be at risk.
If you are so afraid of COVID-19, know that it is a serious disease, it kills in 1-2% of cases, but that the vast majority of deaths have occurred in the RSA, in nursing homes and in intensive care which have become infected sponges for lack of adequate protections. In the latter, half of the hospitalized would have died in a few weeks in particular8, also not COVID. In Italy, without this holocaust, the death toll would be slightly higher than in Germany ...
"The best thing - claims the Dutch scientist - would be able to postpone the contagion of people at risk until a vaccine is available ".
And a vaccine also invokes the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte9: otherwise, "We will not win this battle". A day earlier, the Chief Medical Officer of the United Kingdom, Christopher Whitty, had admitted to a parliamentary committee that "worrying" evidence exists that suggests that immunity to the virus may not be feasible.
Even today we have no scientific evidence about the fact that once recovered patients acquire natural immunity to this disease for a long enough period, which is "Does not make a vaccine impossible, but makes it much less likely"10. By the way, neither the American FDA nor the European EMA, the drug control bodies, have ever approved a single coronavirus vaccine to date. In short, it would be the first.
The issue is tremendously serious: it is no coincidence that Paul Offit, co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine in the XNUMXs, argued that "when Dr. Fauci said 12 to 18 months (to get a vaccine), I thought it was ridiculously optimistic. And I'm sure he did too "11.
1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01181-3
2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01165-3
3 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2008457?query=featured_coron...
4 https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10...
5 https://www.laregione.ch/svizzera/svizzera/1433553/pistole-per-misurare-...
6https://milano.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/04/25/news/coronavirus_da_merc...
7 https://video.corriere.it/esteri/coronavirus-paesi-bassi-pronti-riaprire...
8 https://www.lastampa.it/topnews/primo-piano/2020/04/24/news/in-lombardia...
9 https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2020/04/24/coronavirus-conte-alloms-vir...
10 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-may-be-impossible-to...
11 https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-vaccine-quest-18-months-fauc...
Photo: web / presidency of the council of ministers
