God! a new sight! a net, a snare of hell,
Cassandra – from Agamemnon by Aeschylus
Set by her hand–herself a snare more fell
A wedded wife, she slays her lord,
Helped by another hand!
Ye powers, whose hate
Of Atreus’ home no blood can satiate,
Raise the wild cry above the sacrifice abhorred!
Most of us will remember from high school the story of the prophetess Cassandra, Priam’s beautiful daughter, doomed by Apollo to always speak true prophecies but to never be believed.
Well, at a recent conference I mentioned that I think the Covid battlefield has shifted from the lab to the digital world, and in that world, we will be crushed. This means over the next several years we can expect reoccurring waves of Covid variants, periodically shutting down regions of the country.
I talked about the risk of having finite mindsets in infinite wars (think of the Vietnam War, where the US was playing to win, while the North Vietnamese—who had nowhere else to go, were simply playing to persevere).
I talked about the Nature article The online competition between pro-and anti-vaccination views, which, using Facebook as a proxy, visually shows how anti-vaccination forces have obvious mastery over this new battlefield, whereas we are barely in the game.
I even brought up digital trust, pointing out that most institutions don’t “digitally trust” their own state and county health departments, let alone the CDC. It’s as if we are fighting a war in which our own divisions don’t ever coordinate with each other.
It was all to no avail. Their eyes glazed over as soon as I mentioned Facebook (most physicians see social media as nonsense, perhaps wanting to forget its role as a political weapon over the past 6 years), probably just as yours did reading the Aeschylus quote above.
I hope I am wrong.
But I have a bad feeling that I am Cassandra.