Broken Arrow

"THERE WILL BE A SURPRISE OUTBREAK." ANTHONY FAUCI, M.D.

The youngest person to have ever been awarded the Nobel Prize, Joshua Ledberg, had famously stated, "The single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet is the virus", but, while often repeated, especially in the current public health crisis, it is a quote without context, except for one writer who attributes the source to correspondence. Albert Einstein's quote, "I should have become a watchmaker", might be taken out of context, absent its premise statement that "[t]he release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking", and, given his thought that the fourth world war would be "fought with sticks and stones", it is no marvel that he had believed that "the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind."

Like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had become convinced at the end of his short life that it was "no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's or nonexistence", Dr. Benjamin Spock, to the consternation of William F. Buckley, Jr., had abandoned his life's profession of medicine to discussing foreign policy, particularly the topic of nuclear annihilation, advocating a pari passu disarmament just shy of a unilateralist position, and in that exchange the conservative commentator posited a comparison with the death toll of disease, for which Dr. Spock conceded he had no idea, as well as the death toll of persecution, presenting in example the death toll of the Holocaust.

As a microbiologist, certainly Dr. Ledberg had to be aware that, given the great abundance of viruses and their viriols, as the most abundant biological particles in the world, in comparison to the extremely low number of threats that they had posed to mankind, only 219 by the year 2012, even the vast number of coronaviruses that pose threats to mammals and birds, over three thousand types for each species, compared to only now seven threats to mankind, in nature, viruses are the least likely new emerging threat to mankind, which poses quite a providential coincidence for God's most favored creature on Earth, just like the peculiar coincidence of an abundance of liquid water in a location with just the right temperature and distance from a heliocentric mass for biogenesis to have occurred, which coincidence, despite searching, no evidence yet has been found to have been reproduced anywhere else in the universe. A chief science officer, given to logic, and second in command aboard a Federation starship might describe it as simply fascinating.

But yet the nation's most trusted voice in the current public health crisis was firmly convinced in 2017 that there would be a surprise outbreak during the previous administration, different from the at least five pandemics that have occurred since the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, and convinced that what would have to be the very first snake coronavirus, with the exact zoonotic source still elusive, set off an unprecedented pandemic, from which he is now retiring from being the face of the government response. Truly fascinating, but not logical.