Many people would say that people-pleasing is just a stupid thing to do. Most of the time, you cannot please the majority of people. Ideas can be either very niche or, on the other end of the spectrum, heroic.
Preventing viral pandemics is heroic, mainly when book-written inventions can unite countries and challenge nature.
Say, for argument’s sake, you say something like, “The Government makes us scared of COVID-19; we should not fear viruses”. Okay, but you know that more people don’t want to deal with the plethora of outcomes of a pandemic; more people suffer than thrive during a pandemic. Do you also know that no one is going to an African cave to sit there and be shat on by millions of departing bats that’ll diagnose them with a hemorrhagic virus with a higher mortality rate of around 40% to 90% because there has been no licenses vaccine manufactured for Ebola or the Filoviradae family since 1970s because it’s mutation rate is undeterminable by modern genome systems? Selling unlicensed vaccines in first and third-world countries is illegal because how one would prefer to die is always subjective. For example:
Ebola first broke out in 1976 simultaneously in the Sudan and Zaire, Uganda’s neighbour to the West. Between June and November in 1976, the Ebola virus infected 284 people in Sudan, with 117 deaths. In Zaire, which is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo (but remains non-democratic), there were 318 cases and 280 deaths in September and October. In 1995, an epidemic in Kikwit, Congo, killed 245 people. All in all, before this month’s outbreak in Uganda, the Ebola virus had killed more than 800 of nearly 1,100 documented cases. The index case in Uganda was Esther Awete, a villager who died in her mud hut in Kabedo-Opongon on September 17 after only a day or so of fever and pain, Awete’s chest began hurting. She became feverish and vomited blood. “We thought it was malaria”, said Justin Okot, a neighbour.
In the nearby town of Gulu, Awete was given chloroquine and sent home. “She didn’t even last twenty-four hours”, said Okot, a neighbour. We didn’t understand that someone could die that quickly. The villagers called the disease gemo—or evil spirit. “No one knows about it, but it takes you in the night”. Seven of her family members also died after they had ritually bathed Awetes corpse and washed their hands in a communal basin as a sign of communion with the dead. Then they buried her thirty feet from where she had died.
(Weissmann, 2003, p. 134 -135)
Ethically, a large population of tribes in Africa have had to stop washing their deceased loved ones because it’s too much for healthcare/frontline workers to contain. Not only are highly populated countries hard to control for viruses but there isn’t enough education on the nature of viruses.
If you agree that people should die alone in isolation units, then you’ve decided that (in Jordan Petersons’ words) that would be your God. Or perhaps you’ve morally selected the fate of others who are more vulnerable than you for, let’s say, a 1.2% – 2% mortality rate virus, or perhaps you have decided that “Oh well if it’s a 50% mortality rate virus, who cares who it kills”. Who are you to decide the fate of others’ deaths?
Let’s talk about religion and Ebola victims; if you were to die like the man below. You would become like Esther Awete. Would it be practical if your family were to perform religious rituals on your open wounds when every droplet of blood (once infected) contains one million strains of a virus? Do you know how hard it is for people to sacrifice their culture or religion?
So you understand that if technology can ethically prevent one country’s problem from becoming others—that is far more agreeable and logical not on a subjective scale but in measuring the social implications of meritocracy, to not let these phenomenons happen at all.
In addition as the saying goes, “Men designed technology to challenge nature” (Samuels, 2022) makes it much more ethical to prevent global disruption rather than ‘deciding the fate of everyone’. Particularly when viruses do not care about your moral beliefs or economy.
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