Coronavirus: Big Words From Little Help | Science

The clearest word on Tuesday was hopefully. President Pedro Sanchez presented an ambitious and hopeful vaccination plan and, above all, committed to an accurate and verifiable calendar. Or refutable with the same precision. This is courage, because you know that at the slightest breach of the schedule, octopuses will fall on you, let’s not talk about those that can be an unexpected disaster, like a bottleneck in the vaccine production chain. It seems clear that if the president and his advisors decide to get wet in this swamp of quicksand, they must have plenty of guarantees to implement the plan and achieve herd immunity by the end of August. “Hopefully,” the experts asked. God willing. Big word today.

There are other great words that have resurfaced in the pandemic crisis with more vague intentions. Freedom, to take a silly example. The political parties most vulnerable to corporate pressure have used this noble concept to screw things up. Certainly, freedom is the most basic human aspiration. Anyone who has had to live under a dictatorship can testify, or on the shores of that paradise where wealthy families and vast wealth live.

The freedom to remove the mask and form clumps is recommended by epidemiology

But the freedom that the Madrid right wing claims, another absurd example, is not the freedom to lead a decent life, educate children and access the work system in a fair way, but to go out to bars, go shopping and occupy the streets. With their high-end German cars. Freedom to remove the mask and form clusters that are inhibited by epidemiology. I always remember what cardiologist Valentin Foster said in another context: “People say that taking measures against saturated fat reduces their freedom; answer them that traffic lights also cut it.” Foster, in his time as president of the World Heart Association, was proud to make McDonald’s the largest salad seller on the planet. Pimples will definitely lose their freedom, but they have saved many heart attacks that were going to make their lives bitter.

Another great word is inequality. But I do not mean that the epidemic has blatantly exposed the unacceptable differences that degrade the health of the poor classes and ethnic minorities, but rather the strenuous attempts to impart an exotic sheen to the term. For example, the refusal of vaccination passports depends largely on this lexical trick: Where vaccines are placed according to risk and age criteria, there will be citizens who will be able to travel in the summer and others who will not, and this would generate inequality. Bill. But what is inequality? The one who prefers the elderly because it allows them to take back Imserso trips? I mean, since I can’t travel, old people can’t either. What an intellectual ingenuity.

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