Reasons to be cheerful (RtBC):
Vaccines take a decade, give or take, to develop and test.
Except this past year. With everyone – scientists, governments, big and not-so-big pharma, and even Dolly Parton – pitching in, we developed a Covid-19 vaccine in just over a year, and are now producing and distributing it not in driblets but at full flood.
Not one vaccine, either. At least three working in the U.S., another in Europe (albeit with more side effects), and at least two more, in Russia and China, whose efficacy and safety isn’t clear in the West.
There’s still not enough to go around worldwide, nor the distribution mechanisms to get it where it needs to go under proper storage conditions. But we’ll get there. Of course, some new scourge may emerge in the meantime, but we’re starting to get on top of this one.
(Stay masked and stay safe, because starting isn’t the same as done, no matter how bored we all are with using our indoor voices… and being unable to hear them through our masks.)
Anyway, here’s the RtBC: Look what we have done, working together under crisis conditions.
Consider it a dry run. Climate change is a crisis that makes Covid-19 look like a blood blister.
We’ve demonstrated we know how to pull together, most of us. We’ve demonstrated we have the will, most of us. Now we just need to be as afraid of the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it as we are of a submicroscopic, spiky mass of proteins.