Reassurance, reassurance, reassurance. The EMA has no doubts: the Astra Zeneca vaccine is safe, thromboses are coincidental events. The truth of medicine is as clear and transparent as water: there are no proven correlations between the injection with Astra Zeneca serum and the so-called adverse “events” of cardiovascular origin. In other words: those people, in all likelihood, would die or get sick anyway. Rather, such a low incidence is by no means comparable to the risks that are run with Covid. With Covid you risk big, you die; the vaccine is better anyway. Just like any single drug, it can have side effects – they are the dark side of its effectiveness. If a drug is effective it means that it has a concrete biological action, and this exposes the extraordinary variability of the living being to unpredictable things, but always to an infinitesimal extent with respect to its benefits. And therefore it makes no sense to give up the Astra Zeneca serum to go straight into the coils of the coronavirus. Clearer than that?
Still, we are afraid. We run to read everything, hoping to find certainty. But we will never find it, because the certainties that medicine feeds on, the biostatistic certainties that health care must necessarily use in the effort to save our lives (and it succeeds) are not what our hearts need. More than “knowing” what science knows, we need to be certain that nothing will happen to us. Still, none of us are sure we won’t get under a bus, but we leave the house anyway. No one is sure not to have a heart attack in the middle of the road, we know that about a third of cardiovascular events have no connection with known risk factors. We are mortal, we get sick, we suffer. And basically we accept fate, chance that can sweep us away at any moment. But we die of fear in the face of an adverse drug case. We cannot feel in our heart that a medical act can put us at risk, with an infinitesimal probability, completely not comparable (in the light of reason) to the probability it has of saving our skin.
Philosophers, Boetiscists, doctors have been struggling for centuries on our perception of medicine, which we want to think more as a gift from heaven, a magic perhaps, than as the fruit of the biostatistic truths generated by what John Locke called “the twilight light. of probability “. The doctors that we have been hearing every day for a year now are imbued with this mentality, they know how to reason only in biostatistical terms for which the “adverse case” is a case while millions of lives are saved. But what comes to mind is the Anglo-Saxon saying: “To the man without job, unemployment is hundred percent”.
And so for a year we have been feeling full of anger in front of an army of doctors who “disagree”, who give different versions of the same natural phenomena (the misdeeds of the coronavirus, just to name one), who proclaim everyone pompous its certainty. While we see our freedoms suppressed, we see our world turned upside down, we see our loved ones die in solitude. This discomfort too is the result of the quarrel between the dubious and biostatistic truths of medicine and our need for certainties. (We leave it to psychiatrists and psychologists to explain how the investigation of our soul has little to do with the methods of biomedicine).
But accepting this weakness of ours does not mean indulging in wrong conclusions. It would be pure self-harm. The truth of the heart can continue to be fear, we cannot force ourselves not to have it in the face of disease, disasters, death. But to live long and well we must measure reality ourselves, looking at the results of a science that is halfway like the medicine that every day saves the lives of millions and millions of people. Which led us to an unthinkable average life even 50 years ago, which makes us feel good, which heals all our (often small) ailments. Medicine works, vaccines work. This is the fact of reality that reassures our anxieties. That must be enough for us to get in line, in the hope that the health authorities will vaccinate us all as soon as possible. Maybe with a bit of disquiet, but knowing that this is the only way that Covid is filed.
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