The quiet saviours

This keeps hap­pen­ing. I am at a loss to know why...

The most re­cent, re­ceived this week - Are you the same Mar­tin Kirby who wrote Ar­te­r­ial Em­boliza­tion for Pri­mary Post­par­tum Haem­or­rhage in the 2009 Jour­nal of Vas­cu­lar and In­ter­ven­tional Ra­di­ol­ogy?

I could keep you hang­ing but that would be fraud. Nope. Not me.

I con­fess to bathing for a fleet­ing sec­ond in the glow of such pos­i­tive mis­taken iden­tity, as I shov­elled pony poo into the wheel­bar­row, weighed the good against the bleak and tried to keep pos­i­tive. It was, per­versely, some­thing very pos­i­tive, a re­minder of the re­mark­able ca­pa­bil­ity and ded­i­ca­tion of some hu­mans - the sci­en­tists con­stantly push­ing the bound­aries of un­der­stand­ing.

How we need them. I said it last May and I need to re­it­er­ate it again.

Peo­ple are dying, fam­i­lies and peo­ple are iso­lated and fright­ened, men­tal health is­sues are deep­en­ing, health pro­fes­sion­als are giv­ing their ab­solute all in a sys­tem creak­ing at the seams, small busi­nesses are col­laps­ing and yet.... and yet.....

Every­one seems to com­pre­hend that Britain is a bas­ket case right now. The rul­ing Tory party, ruth­less and now steeped in sleaze, has some se­ri­ously alarm­ing – de­ranged to my mind – peo­ple in its ranks. A re­cent tar­get for their angst has been Chris Whitty, the coun­try’s chief med­ical of­fi­cer, coun­ter­part to Spain’s Fer­nando Simón, and An­thony Fauci in the US.

Whitty, like Simón and Fauci, is an em­i­nent physi­cian and epi­demi­ol­o­gist, whose mea­sured and qual­i­fied ad­vice con­tin­ues to pro­vide vital re­as­sur­ance and qual­i­fied as­sess­ment as he is forced to stand be­side PM John­son and as­sorted min­is­ters whose mes­sages are pre­dom­i­nantly in­co­her­ent. He has been phys­i­cally at­tacked in the street and is now the tar­get for puffed up right wing politi­cians foam­ing at the mouth that some­one who is un­elected is call­ing the shots. He is only an ex­pert for pity’s sake.

Whitty, Simón, Fauci and their global equals are not the sorts to raise their voices, so we must lis­ten in­tently. Not easy. They lack celebrity sparkle and no­to­ri­ety, so the fickle media re­mains a moth to the flame of the shal­low, ego­tis­ti­cal loud­mouths with noth­ing to say.

This ever-evolv­ing pan­demic, if noth­ing else, has brought into sharp and sick­en­ing focus this and other malaises of our self­ish age.

The epi­demi­ol­o­gists state one glar­ingly ob­vi­ous fact, though, one that no­body can fail to grasp: we have to treat the whole world to de­feat Covid. In the con­text of the ever-in­creas­ing dis­tance be­tween the pin­na­cle of the first world and the depths of the third, and there has never been a more press­ing mo­ment in my life­time for self­less­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion and car­ing.

And yet... and yet...

We are not in one boat. Through this tragedy and chal­lenge, stark ex­tremes and other hor­rors come into acute focus. While refugee fam­i­lies with ab­solutely noth­ing but hope take to de­flat­ing dinghies, a few peo­ple have been loudly cap­i­tal­is­ing, mak­ing mon­u­men­tal for­tunes, mind­lessly flaunt­ing their gains by tak­ing so­cial dis­tanc­ing to the ex­treme. It beg­gars be­lief how stark the ex­tremes. Yet it is the so­ci­ety we have cre­ated and will strug­gle to ever bal­ance.

I make no ex­cuse for keep­ing you in the pic­ture.

There are now circa 2,755 bil­lion­aires world­wide, a rise of 660 com­pared with 2020 (Forbes 2021). More than 200 new super-yachts were launched this year up to Sep­tem­ber, up from 165 in the same pe­riod in 2019, and there are or­ders for 330 to be built be­fore 2023. (Your av­er­age super-yacht costs $275 mil­lion).

Mean­while, sales of arms and mil­i­tary ser­vices by the in­dus­try’s 100 largest com­pa­nies to­talled $531 bil­lion in 2020, an in­crease of 1.3 per cent in real terms com­pared with the pre­vi­ous year (Stock­holm In­ter­na­tional Peace Re­search In­sti­tute).

If only Whitty, Simón and Fauci could find a vac­cine to save us from our­selves.