Kassandra and the Cure
A parable to help us empathize with those on the other side of the Covid-19 debate
A parable to help us empathize with those on the other side of the Covid-19 debate
The following is a thought experiment using a short story format. The intention is to invite people to understand and/or empathize with where I was coming from with my “rant” post yesterday. (For those of you who missed that post, I invite you to either go read it, or to just follow this experiment as I think it will perhaps lead to understanding the gist of that post by inference).
Here goes:
There was a woman named Kassandra living in the country of Karangistan, a country long known for its natural splendor, colorful scarves and repressive governments. Entrepreneurs from the outside look at this country and see it as one of great potential, if only that predilection for crappy governments could be taken care of.
Wars, coups, economic sanctions and cultural revolutions have all been tried, but still the government persists so people living in this country have just accepted it as a matter of course. A phrase that is often thought, but rarely spoken is “Beautiful day, lousy government.”
But there’s one thing that can break through this government: a global pandemic. Like the rest of the world, life has been greatly altered during the first year of this pandemic — many have died, businesses have been lost and the government’s response has been, for the most part, inept. Meanwhile, the fallout from all of this has been increasing tribalism within the country, to the point where it’s breaking apart long-time friendships and previously strong families.
However, in recent months the government has, in a rare show of solidarity with world governing bodies, gotten 100 percent behind the cure. This cure is a new drug developed in a lab by top scientists. It’s truly a medical marvel, a technological triumph, how quickly it was developed and deployed.
Well, that’s not entirely true. For remember, Karangistan’s inept government can swing through even the loftiest of softballs. In this case, while many countries now have access to this new drug, in Karaganistan the drug is, for the most part, not available. It’s certainly not available to Kassandra or her family.
At least Kassandra is fortunate that her family is still together. However, there are some growing cracks and the biggest one is over this pandemic. You see, her husband believes strongly that the government’s mandated response to the pandemic, this new drug, is the correct one. And he claims they just need to be patient in waiting for the drug. He also reminds her that she can’t even claim that the Karangistanian government is being its usual isolated self; in this case, it has the backing of the world governments and its top health officials.
Still, Kassandra has questions. She has to be very careful in how she asks those questions because this is a country where asking too many questions can lead one to rat-infested, sunlight-deprived, nutritious-food-denying prison cells … or worse. But she is clever and finds ways to ask her questions and she comes across some information that shows there may be another cure. It’s a cure that she is much more comfortable with for one main reason: unlike the new drug, it’s been around for decades.
Of course, the new drug has all of the media, the public health agencies and the experts behind it and they deny that there’s any merit to the woman’s concern about long-term impacts of the drug. “Don’t worry,” they say, “the drug is safe and effective.” They say this over and over. But Kassandra knows simply repeating something doesn’t make it true. In fact, she’s learned to be suspicious when governments and their cohorts repeat things. The press secretaries of Karangistan have been repeating for years that they have the best government in the world, for example.
Yet Kassandra knows that even if the drug seems to be living up to its safe and effective billing so far, there is simply no way of knowing if it will be true in the long-run. That’s just basic logic, she thinks. She certainly hopes it will be, for she has friends outside of Karangistan who have already taken it and she deeply values these friends. Still, at this point, no one knows, no one can know. It’s a gamble.
Meanwhile, this cure Kassandra has discovered has been around and used for several decades and has been sanctioned by the same world public health outlets as very safe for human consumption.
In addition, she learns that in some countries that don’t have repressive governments like her own, people are allowed to use this cure and so far the results have been very promising. There are studies showing this, yet those that support the new drug deny those studies exist.
This is all extremely frustrating to Kassandra. She was under the impression that the world was working together to solve this global crisis. While she knows it’s been impossible over the years to get rid of Karangistan’s lousy governments — either from the inside or the outside — she had thought that because this was a global problem requiring global solutions, this might be one instance where there’d be global cooperation in how to solve it. And she’d thought that Karangistan agreeing with those world bodies about the solution signaled this.
How, she wonders, can we address this pandemic if in some countries promising cures are denied and in others they are allowed? Especially if, in some countries like hers, even with acceptance of the global cure, they can’t even access it? How will this pandemic ever be solved with such a patchwork, haphazard response?
Kassandra has long ago realized that it’s best not to trust in outside agencies to look after her and her family so, after doing this research, she wants nothing more than to get this cure she’s discovered but, after investigating for days on end (and as quietly as possible, of course), she has come to the conclusion that she simply can’t get access to this solution.
She’s being denied the agency to look after her health and the health of her family and being shamed or ridiculed for her efforts to take that personal responsibility, being told she simply needs to trust the authorities and wait on their cure.
This brings up a deep, resonant memory for her. When she was a young adult, her father had come down with a devastating disease. Well, devastating in Karangistan, at least. Because in other countries, a cure existed. But in Kassandra’s country, the government said that cure was too dangerous and thus it was denied people — -even people on their death beds — -in the name of protecting them.
For Kassandra, that experience had made her eternally suspicious of outside authorities justifying decisions for the health of her or her loved ones based on protecting her. Too often, she felt, those justifications were lies and she’d done enough sleuthing over the years to see how this pattern repeated throughout Karangistanian history.
But she’d thought better of the world at large, which was why this situation was so frustrating for her. Again, where was the global togetherness? Did world leaders and people in other countries not understand that without cures being available all around the world, this pandemic would continue? Did they not want it to end?
She didn’t know the answer to these questions but they nagged at her and caused her sleepless nights. In addition, when she raised these questions with friends, she was mocked for having them. It was an extremely isolating position and it made her want to lash out, especially because these friends said they were doing it for her health. It was all so condescending and seemed the exact opposite of caring!
No, all she wanted was access to the cure she’d discovered, the cure that had been around for decades and been proven safe and effective.
All she wanted was access to the vaccine.
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