I’d never have guessed a year ago that Covid would still be the center of our public conversation. Here’s what I’ve gleaned from all the information and misinformation with which we are being bombarded. (By the way, The Hawaii public heath website has the easiest to understand graphic on the relationship by age cohort between Infection, Hospitalization, and Death. Check it out. It should put parents’ fears to rest concerning their children.)

Anyway, here’s how I’m reading all this that is flowing both from government propagandists and actual virologists. This SARS-CoV2 is going to infect humans until Christ gives us our new bodies at The Return. It is never going to go away and government efforts to make it do so are both futile and counterproductive. Whether we like it or not, God has designed our immune systems to build resistance over multiple exposures to these coronaviruses. And there are two ways of getting these exposures.

The first, best, and most dangerous means is natural infection. There are many components to a virus, and when the immune system is exposed to a virus it builds a multifaceted, wide-ranging response to it. In other words, our God-given immune response to a virus is as complex as the virus itself. Multiple exposures to the virus will build a very robust immune response. This is why children get really messy colds and old folk like myself seldom get a cold, and when we do it is very mild. My colds last about two days and are at worst a mild annoyance. (This is true until our bodies start getting serious about preparing for death. When that starts happening our immune systems start turning off so whatever comes along can lay us in our graves.)

The second best way of building an effective immune response is vaccination. Some vaccines like the measles vaccine use the virus itself and they almost always convey lifelong immunity. The Covid vaccine is not this type of vaccine. It only replicates the spike protein, the key the virus uses to unlock the cell and inject itself into it. That is very good as far as it goes. It will prevent a massive viral invasion and it greatly reduces the likelihood of serious infection, hospitalization, and death. BUT because it only targets one portion of the virus and not the whole thing like the immune response to natural infection, the possibility of the virus mutating on that one spike protein and evading the immune system is greater.

The best way, as far as I can tell, to build a robust resistance to the Covid virus for the entire community is to vaccinate as many as possible and not promote masking and avoidance. Allow, encourage, vaccinated people and previously infected people to mix and mingle. Let those whose immune systems have been fortified either through natural infection or vaccination be exposed to the virus and let that exposure strengthen their immune systems against serious illness in the future.

Again, this virus is not going to go away, but God has designed us to adapt to its presence and overcome it naturally. We can help the process along with vaccination, but vaccination will not solve the problem. That will require time and multiple infections which we must allow. And yes, those with weak immune systems will die with the disease and there is absolutely nothing we can do about that; about .9% of the population dies every year with about 80% of them being over 65.