How many students in American High Schools study biology? How many students in college take biology and learn about and understand genetics or how cells work or how diseases work in the body? Not many. Most students in school want to do well. Some of them work hard and are brilliant. Some catch onto and understand the material quickly, some take a little more time. Part of a teacher's skill is to nurture and encourage. For some the subject just may be a fog. All that ever really matters is that they give it a go, achieve some progress, however small, some understanding. Unfortunately and to our cost some students emerge from our schools with only a basic understanding. Many unfortunately will have no idea how a pandemic works.

So why should we want students to understand? We all have blind spots. Educating ourselves, reading widely, being curious from cradle to grave, is how we fill them in. To understand a pandemic there are some scientific facts you have to understand which are not easy. What is a mutation? How do cells work? What is a virus? What are genes? What's the double helix? For the vast majority these can be mysteries. After twelve years of schooling, how many students mastered calculus? But as a point of contrast, how many scientists working on the Webb Space Telescope know calculus? For a project like that you have to have certain levels of intelligence and knowledge. If we don't have the knowledge or the understanding of a technical and difficult subject, we either find out so that we don't look ignorant or reversely if we feel there are enough people who also don't know we make something up. Often the more outrageous the idea, the more believable it can be. This pandemic has been blamed on - a plot by the government, the work of aliens, putting computer chips into people, magic spells, etc.. etc... Past history is crammed full of strange beliefs in reaction to the unknown. It can be the foundation of some religions. Unfortunately when it comes to viruses, strange beliefs about them can kill.

Vaccination is not rocket science. There are billions of viruses. Along with their larger cousins, microbes, they are one of the building blocks of life. Basically they are tiny, tiny blobs of protein. Very occasionally one can be harmful to human beings especially when a virus learns how to get into the bloodstream. Humans have a system which either defends itself or is overcome. Viruses are always floating around. Most are benign. They learn to adapt to us as we learn to adapt to them. That's the way nature works. Adaptation often takes time so when it comes to harmful viruses, we have cleverly learned ways to short circuit our defences by introducing non-lethal versions of the same virus which then trick the body into ways to defend itself. We call it vaccination, after cows. For some this is a difficult idea because they have no science background, no understanding of biology and it all sounds weird and science fictional. We have to remember that each year there are approximately 6 million 17 year olds in the US and only one and a half percent take AP Biology so any understanding of biology the other 98.5% might have has to be only basic. How do you get across to people generally that every unvaccinated person is its own little experimental laboratory for producing viruses which might change or mutate and have the potential to be lethal to all? It's as if the unvaccinated are deliberately giving the virus the conditions to change. The greater the number of unvaccinated, the great chances of something new. How do we get across the idea that the greater the number of vaccinated, the safer we will all be. It's a challenge. There are going to be more pandemics. This is how life works on this planet. Ironically it's not just Covid that is killing us. What is really killing us and will kill us in the future is our ignorance.