The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever…

The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever lived died from some form of infection, the majority before they’d even reached adulthood. Pandemics are defined by the number and spread of infections. /1

Not by the new modern political con of degree of acute harm, like how many end up in hospital. Very typical again of a modern populist culture whose public policy attention span is now about 10 minutes. There was wisdom in defining pandemics purely in terms of infections. /2

Because it introduces TIME to the definition. The thing about infectious agents is, they KEEP INFECTING. Inter-generationally. Suppressed acute harm in the present day says nothing about the multiplication of that harm across generations, centuries or even millennia. /3

You can con people in the populist present day by saying not many people are getting really sick. Again worth pointing out that nearly every infectious disease we vaccinate against didn’t kill many people, in the short term. That’s not why we vaccinated. /4

We vaccinated to control the disease, longer term. To save individual lives too (imagine that). But also to recognise that infection is not understood only in terms of current fads and fashions. It will keep maiming and killing for centuries, if allowed. /5

Even the relatively low mortality for Covid now (and that’s a relative relative), when multiplied across all future generations, is an enormous mortality. But we can’t think outside the present day. Only institutions think about the past, and the future. /6

They use the past, to project into the future, to guide the present. To populists focused upon their present-day status, they just get in the way. They say no too often. In our still countercultural revolution culture, all ‘no’ is seen as oppression. We’re eternal teens. /7

Add to this the increasing understanding of what I think is the next frontier in medicine, chronic and persistent infection, which may cause a huge proportion of all human chronic disease, and you can see the urgency to always fight infection. /8

The populist numpties who celebrate the capacity of our immune systems to offer some protection against infection are again focused entirely upon their 10-minute packages of status and popularity. It’s like crashing your car every day, because ‘hey I have airbags’. /end