My COVID-19 PSA - A Virus Works Like Velcro on a Tennis Ball

Ok folks, so my dad is a county health officer, one of those local public health officials everyone was so focused on in the last year of the last presidency because of the absenteeism of the Trump administration throughout the entire pandemic fight. As such, it is both important that I make a statement regarding the seriousness of the virus and the importance of getting vaccinated and important that I state that, while my views are informed-by and exchanged-with my father, occasionally, they are both my own and not certified as 'expert' in any way, excepting my qualifications to analyze social statistics for patterns, which can, in fact, produce medical effect.

Nevertheless, I expect that my non-certified, self-directed and relative expertise will be more convincing to some, however small the sliver may be, and since every single shot counts, here goes:

I heard a PSA on the radio trying to assure listeners that the virus had been produced carefully, without skipped steps, with solid science that just happened, luckily, to be ready for first deployment under emergency circumstances. All of this is true, but I felt that it was missing something.

It matters that the vaccine is not organic. It never was alive. Think of it as a plastic bumper. Its not plastic, its made of the same halfway-to-protein acids that the cells build stuff out of, but its not cells and stuff.

Think of a healthy cell as a tennis ball (yes, its full of organs and fluids and stuff, but we're worried about how things get in and out). Well, a virus is like a jellyfish with velcro-hook tentacles. Sometimes the hooks are too big to catch in the fuzz, and sometimes they're even better than the original velcro-hooks. Inside of a live virus is fluid. It contains RNA, which is loose DNA, looking for a date. Old vaccines, they were made from dead virus, which is like a strip of velcro attached to a dried up egg-sac, the stuff inside can still be injected into the cell's fluid, but the RNA is too broken to catch any play.

The cell, meanwhile, is the suburban house of the body, but the cops patrol out on the street and they're not much good at fighting house-to-house. When the body's cops learn how to imitate the velcro-hooks of the virus-gang they're fighting, they can issue patches to all units that allow them to hook onto the same corner of the house that the virus gang likes to enter by. Pretty soon, you've got cops hooked to every house in the neighborhood, the gang can't get into any houses, so they all starve or get caught. The cops eventually die and get replaced with loose cops, but they still get issued the patches with every new graduating class.

I've got two different metaphors going here. The houses are covered in tennis ball fuzz, folks.

So there was some danger with the first generation of vaccines, which is not a young generation, by the way. Vaccines were invented in the 1790s, innovating on science first tested in the U.S. by the Black slave of one Cotton Mather, perhaps the best-known early-scientist from the Colonial period in America.. . Since the SARS epidemic of the second Bush administration, China and the global health community has invested heavily in studying respiratory viruses, that is, viruses that affect and are often spread by the lungs and through the air.

COVID-19 is a SARS virus, which, as I understand it, is a category, not a name. Because we have been studying all kinds of SARS viruses, not just the one that spread in Asia to everyone's great terror those years back, but a whole spread, we already knew the part of the cell that the COVID-19 virus attaches to. We know the right shape for the velcro hooks, we did in 2019, when the virus was already spreading but no one had recognized it was different from the flu.

More importantly, we can 3D print cell-sized velcro, now.

So that's what we're doing. You are going to be injected with a...its like a plastic or a rubber or a styrofoam bumper, only its made of protein half-crystals, and its got 3d printed velcro on the inside, and it will attach to all your cells and your immune system cops will fight with them, even though they're only blow-up dolls, and they'll issue patches, so that they can fight either the blow-up dolls or even the real, live bad-guys, if they come later.

There is one thing though.

Sometimes cops riot.

No, I get it, it is an uncomfortable thing, but not all cops are good people. Sometimes three or four bad cops get into command positions and things get out of hand. It happens.

When it happens in the body, it looks like you had a really bad reaction to the vaccine. You might sweat, shake, feel cold and shiver, maybe a lot. You might feel queasy, or even pass out. The reality is that you've just had a way too good reaction. You body's cops held rallies all over the country to distribute patches, so they're good to go, just as soon as all the little cities, states and towns of your body get the streets cleaned up and traffic moving again. They got excited, that's all. They're good little immune system cops, actually...

So that's my juice. The cell is a suburban house with a tennis-ball-fuzz paint job and immune system cops are good cops.

Get vaccinated. Don't wait for 'Bron. Heroes sometimes disappoint.