Nature vs.

Nature can be grumpy piece of shit sometimes, and there’s nothing it hates more than uncontrolled population growth. Often, if it feels a population is getting above itself, nature will callously starve it out of existence. If that fails, it’s equally keen on terrifying acts of violence, or inflicting the lingering agony of thirst. Nature considers you to be a suboptimal piece of shit, and is desperate to replace you with something better, preferably before you’ve had a chance to breed. But if it can’t stop you breeding, it’ll try even harder to murder your children. 

Occasionally, if violence and hunger doesn’t work out, nature is inclined to something a little more cunning. It has a suite of deadly diseases on hand to brutalise any persistently successful populations, often at the point when they are getting cocky or complacent. It also has a number of brilliant strategies for creating novel pathogens, usually by repurposing a disease from a similar species. For as long as life has existed, nature has been systematically trying to kill it in a variety of horrible ways. 

This four billion year campaign of relentless murder might sound unforgivable, but to be fair, nature has a difficult job to do. If you want to keep living things in balance and drive change through evolution, endless acts of brutality are the best way to go. This is the price of our biological complexity, paid by every generation of every species in history. Or nearly every generation. Nature was completely in charge, right up until the last few hundred years. 

Recently, human medicine and technology have pushed some of us briefly beyond the limits, lowering infant mortality to a point where the vast majority survive into adulthood. This is probably only a temporary blip before nature works its way around our defences, but it appears that within a few generations, complacency has set in. Unsurprisingly, this is especially the case in the countries and societies that are most distanced from disease and death. These days, few of us in the world’s most affluent lands will see our children die. Contagious diseases that dominate mortality across much of the world, are now just theoretical threats, easily countered by a range of symptomless holiday jabs. 

When my daughter was born, I had little doubt that she would become a healthy, successful adult. Nineteen years later, I have been proven correct, although to be fair, the odds were always on our side. In the UK today, over 99.6% of children will reach the age of 18. But throughout most of our evolutionary history, around half of all humans died during childhood, a level of loss that is now nearly impossible to comprehend.

I often read about these horrors, but I am so removed from them that I may as well be ignorant. Our technology, money, medicine and infrastructure distances us almost completely from the natural world. And perhaps due to a strange quirk of our complex minds, this distance often makes us revere nature in all the wrong ways. We happily remember its beauty, but casually ignore its terror. We make false gods of all things natural, imagining them to be benign, perfect and nurturing. Horrors must be man made, born of failings, malice or inadequacy. Natural deities would never be so cruel.

Over the past few months, this ignorant reverence has been our undoing. For years, most people in developed countries came to believe that we had finally defeated nature, rather than just briefly controlled it. Our public health infrastructure, initially created to counter the all-natural threats of typhoid and cholera, relaxed way too far when it came to infectious disease. Public health within developed nations largely adopted a different role, endlessly pointing at our human failings. We were taught that these days, we only have to fear diseases of affluence. Illness was framed as a problem of choice. 

Our governments and health leaders always knew that there was a significant risk of a devastating pandemic; a plague every few years is very much part of the human condition. But perhaps they thought that with all our high tech health care, such primitive threats were beneath us. Surely we can just spend our way out of trouble, procure the answers, then watch as the poorer countries show us what suffering looks like. It couldn’t happen here.  Nature wouldn’t dare. Nature is a harmless pet that that technology has tamed, locked away safely in its cage. 

And so for years, believing that the cage was locked forever in the world’s wealthiest nations, public health became a game of lifestyle management. Illness became weakness, a purely moral failing, reserved for lesser souls. The only reason to die before your time was because you could not resist. That drink, that donut, that drug, that cigarette. Only the greedy die young. The message of countless public health campaigns, from the left and right of politics, was that poor choices are the only remaining threat to health. Anyone claiming otherwise was held as a pariah. 

So when nature broke out of its cage, snarling, spitting and hungry for blood, we weren’t ready. Over the years, we had all the time, knowledge and resources to ensure our safety. We could have planned for every eventuality, cut off every line of attack. But when faced with a genuine public health threat, our poorly prepared infrastructure crumbled and faltered. It failed at the task it was born to do. It should have been public health’s time to shine, to show its mettle, prove its worth. There are no excuses worth hearing. A respiratory disease pandemic had been predicted a thousand times. There had even been a training run. This virus is literally SARS CoV 2.

When the time came, we couldn’t test, we couldn’t track, we couldn’t trace. For a long time, we couldn’t even cover the faces of healthcare workers. In the most affluent nations on earth, doctors and nurses wore bin bags in place of PPE. The public were lied to about masks to protect supplies. The world was lied to about transmission, for fear of embarrassing the Chinese government. Borders stayed open to protect the economy, sacrificing a million lives for a few months trade. To prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, we sent the infected back into care homes, turning loved ones into weapons of destruction. It must be the cruelest fate, to die knowing that your presence has killed. 

The virus hit us so hard because we thought that it couldn’t happen here. Not like this. Not with our money and privilege. Not with our drugs and machines, our shiny hospitals and safe water. We foolishly believed that we could lifestyle our way out. Spend our way out. Lie our way out.

But here we are. We’ve had a slap in the face from nature, reminding us exactly who’s boss. Not even a real slap. Just a tickle, compared to what might have been. Next time, we need to be ready. We must never forget what a nasty fucking bitch nature can be. Lives have been lost, but we are nearly through this now, and at least a valuable lesson has been learnt.

Or so you would hope. But in recent months, I have started to doubt that we are capable of learning what this disease really means. The lifestyle gurus, who dictated so much of our public health discourse pre-pandemic, have started to crawl back out of the cracks. Bizarre conspiracy theories have begun to gain force, emboldened by the persistent and widely accepted delusion that nature is benign. There is a movement so committed to a previous way of thinking, that I fear it will point blank refuse to accept this crisis for what it is. 

Covid is a lifestyle disease, they cry. Covid is a diet disease. Diet is the best vaccine. Don’t fear the virus. Don’t let the virus control you. Masks are unnatural. The healthy don’t need them. Nature is our friend; it would never hurt the virtuous. The virus must be man made; only man could be so cruel.

Over time, as the balance of Covid deaths has shifted towards the world’s poor, the rich and privileged have started to imagine that they are immune. Blame for lockdowns and restrictions has been pushed back onto the weak and the sick. The obese and diabetic. The old and infirm. The poor and foreign looking. It has not taken long for this rhetoric to turn towards certain lives being expendable. After all, they should have listened to all those warnings about cake. 

If you want to let nature off the hook, someone must be to blame. Blaming fat people has worked before, so why not give that a go? We previously thought that it was a virulent new disease that got us into this mess, but we’ve actually discovered that it was those greedy fat fuckers all along. Public Health didn’t get the pandemic wrong, fat people did by ignoring them.

All these delusions are connected, and so is the next looming threat to our safety. Over the next few months, the narrative of vaccine denial will start to grow. Don’t jab me. Don’t jab my children. Don’t trust big Pharma. Don’t be controlled. Many will become convinced that they are better off taking their chances with a natural virus than a man made jab. Any vaccine, they will say, has not been properly tested on enough people. I’d rather become infected with the harmless Covid sniffles, than have an unknown chemical stuck into my arm. 

But let’s remember that the virus has been thoroughly tested on huge numbers of people, all across the world. The results are in and they don’t look great. In populations such as the UK, Covid kills nearly 1% of everyone it infects. If that doesn’t sound too serious, imagining lining up with 100 people up against a wall, knowing that one of you is going to be picked out at random and slowly kicked to death. How relaxed would you be stood in that line? Then imagine another 10 people get pulled out of the line and have their lungs damaged so badly that it leaves them critically ill in hospital, fighting for life on a ventilator. From the 89 remaining, a few more are going to be infected with a poorly understood long term condition that leaves them constantly fatigued and unable to work for months. Most of the others are going to be given severe flu like symptoms, leaving them bed ridden at home for a couple of weeks, often struggling to breathe. And you also would have to remind everyone still living, that even though they will probably get better over the long term, there’s no evidence that this is the case, so they’ll just have to keep their fingers crossed. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that every single person in the line up is going to be at risk of passing on a potentially fatal disease to their colleagues, friends and loved ones for the next week or so.

Why would anyone willingly stand in that line? Why would you volunteer yourself for death, pain, suffering and contagion? What sort of selfish fuck would knowingly subject their friends and family to such a risk? Only a stone cold fucking idiot would voluntarily shun a vaccine that could slash your chance of having to stand there by 95%. The Pfizer Biontech vaccine, which does exactly that, has been tested on over 20,000 subjects with no serious safety concerns. 20,000 people stood in a row and took the jabs. No one died or got sick. None of them posed the slightest risk to the people they loved. If you injected 20,000 people with coronavirus and sent them back in to the community, you’d end up killing thousands. That’s the difference between nature and medicine. Medicine is designed to keep us safe. Nature wants us dead.

It is only a life of ignorant privilege that could leave you inclined towards infecting yourself with a novel, deadly, contagious disease, just because a random YouTuber reckons you probably won’t die. That, and a society that has been consistently led to believe that public health is all about lifestyle. We now have dumb fuck minor celebrities claiming that the police will have to hold them down to give them a jab, and a national newspaper columnist claiming that there will be riots if her children are required to be immunised (spoiler - they won’t be). Health influencers and diet advocates are increasingly sharing anti-vaccine propaganda, seemingly worried that this medical advance might threaten their lucrative new business model. For the first time in history, an anti-vaccine movement is forming in front of our eyes, emerging long before the immunisation programme even started. Somehow it has continued to gather momentum, even when the disease that the vaccine prevents is killing thousands of people every day, and injuring countless more.

Anti-vaccine sentiment tends to increase along with level of education, proving that wisdom and knowledge are different things. You don’t have to live in a rich country to understand that nature wants to fuck you up. The poorer the society you inhabit, the easier it is to accept that your best chance lies with progress. With things that are specifically designed to keep us safe, and rigorously tested to prevent harm. 

Covid has been a shitty ride for most of us. We all want it to be over. Personally, I’d take five untested m-RNA shots to each eyeball and a bonus Russian jab up my arse, if it means I can return to my boring old life. I want to walk along the Trent to the City Ground with my dad, so we can watch Forest lose in person. I want to drop in to my local pub for a pint of Guinness on the way home. I want to take the train into town, visit a customer, spend a day in the development kitchen. I want to give talks to students, sign books and speak at festivals. Although these things feels like life, none of that shit is natural. Poncy middle class food festivals, overpriced country pubs and chanting football crowds are about as far from nature as it’s possible to be.

Nature doesn’t want you to go out with friends, to fly around the world, to hang out a concert. It wants you to suffer. It wants your weakest children to die. The natural state of humanity is not dinner parties, nightclubs and foreign holidays. It is blood and violence and hunger and pain. It is disease, disaster and despair. It is 50% infant mortality, mass starvation, and a novel disease every few years. The natural world may look beautiful and benign, but behind the façade is a life or death struggle, where death is the winner most of the time.

We are going to have to fight against nature if we want to get back to the things we love. A vaccine is how we win, at least for now. But it will need mass acceptance, mass compliance, total belief. An understanding that even though there is always some uncertainty, sometimes you have to take the path that is least bad. Right now, it is abundantly clear that a vaccine path is several hundred times less bad than a viral one.

Yes, there will be fuckwits. There will be those that pick at uncertainty or challenge the vaccine consensus, like a toddler trying to smash something for attention. There will be others looking to monetise vaccine fears, offering ineffective, but more natural sounding alternatives. But we can’t let these idiots dominate the debate. Not this time. There’s too much at stake. Herd immunity will only happen if the fuckwits are sufficiently marginalised. We cannot ban them, especially in this information age, because that only emboldens, lending credence to ridiculous conspiracies. Taking the piss is by far our best defence right now. Calling them childish names. Making up stupid jokes. Shining bright light on their hilarious idiocy. Calling out their garbage beliefs with logic, swearing and cringeworthy puns. The scientists have done some astonishing work to develop several new vaccines in record time. I now call upon Angry Chef readers to form a proud legion of piss takers - swearing, joking and ridiculing this stupid fucking disease out of existence. Go forth onto Facebook and take the fucking piss. It’s our time to shine. 

We really need to come together on this one. When it’s done, I promise we can go back to arguing about carbs, keto or processed food. Even if you disagree with everything I have written in the past, and I know that plenty of readers do, if there’s a logical bone in your body, I implore you to join this fight. We need to briefly put aside our differences to create a focused, consistent message that counters the noise. We need the anti-vaccine movement to be seen as the sick, dangerous joke that it is. We need the Covid denialists need to be laughed and taunted out of existence. More than ever, we need a bit less knowledge and a bit more wisdom. Because right now, wisdom is the only thing that can give us back our lives.