“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”

The quote above is from Ecclesiastes and simply states that there is nothing that has not been here before.

Today there is a hew and cry about a new reality, but while what we are experiencing is real, it’s certainly not new.

In the beginning, from the advent of the “Big Bang”, or when God “spoke the world into existence”, all living organisms have tended to survive by replication and adaptation.

If one believes that all human species evolved from one woman, call her Eve, or whatever, then the variety of human beings — African, Caucasian, Chinese, Indian, etc — speaks to the efforts by mankind to adapt and replicate.

If we also believe that all living organisms seek to survive environmental threats and do this through adaptation and replication, then we must assume that the first virus had these qualities as well. And that it, too, wished to survive by adaptation and replication.

In 2020, the Covid-19 virus brought the world to a standstill. This replicate of the original virus created and continues to create havoc throughout the world. But it is no new virus; it is simply an old virus adapting to environmental threats and seeking to survive through the normal processes of adaptation and replication.

And as scientists race to find a “cure”, which is simply another threat to the organism, it will respond in the way that all living organisms do …. that is, adapt and replicate. Hence, the proliferation of variants.

What has changed in this whole process is how the human body has responded to an attack in its attempt to survive. Before any scientific intervention, it took man’s defence system weeks, even months, to build up its immunity to the virus.

With scientific intervention through genetic manipulation, however, it is hoped that the time the body needs to respond to the attack is much shorter and stronger. How the intervention by science will affect the natural human response to future variant attacks is an unknown.

CLEVELYN CRICHLOW

Paget