Verified by 
Key points
- Collaborating and pooling funding with corporations, governments, universities, and scientists accelerated vaccine development astronomically.
- Good science explores, keeps an open mind, acknowledges and studies the unexpected, which creates trust.
- Society needs brilliant minds to figure out a new way to live in a pandemic beyond quarantines, isolations, and vaccines.
“In terms of having some sort of international response, we’re trying to build the airplane as we’re flying it.” Jeremy Youde, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota Duluth as quoted in Scientific American on 23 March 2020.
We began promisingly, with countries entering lockdowns and corporations, governments, universities, scientists breaking through historical and geographical barriers to learn together about the novel coronavirus and develop a vaccine to it. Collaborating and pooling funding accelerated vaccine development astronomically. Funding without collaboration wouldn’t have harnessed the power of emerging science about SARS-CoV-2; collaboration without funding wouldn’t have resulted in vaccines being tested and rolled out so quickly.
Another stunning change: people coming together, cutting across traditional borders and barriers. Astonishingly, political rivals in Canada teamed up to combat the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and even lauded each other while supporting Canadians across the socioeconomic spectrum (except for the disabled). Team Canada made us feel like we were in this together; we dropped COVID-19 case counts dramatically.
Then things began to unravel.
The SARS-CoV-2 invasion is essentially a long-term sickness. People aren’t used to being sick for a long period of time; they balked at the strictures illness brings.
Instead of an individual or family coming down with a nasty virus, the public collectively came down with it.
Like a family’s variable vulnerability to a virus, some members of the public somehow managed to avoid catching it; others caught it but were mildly sick; some ended up in the hospital, and some died. A family battling a virus usually supports each other through it. They control virus spread in the home to reduce all coming down with it. They feed the sickest; when the sickest recover, they return the favour to give the caregivers rest.
Dysfunctional families, though, leave the sickest to manage on their own while the still healthy go out to work or party, uncaring if they carry the virus with them to infect others outside the family. Then they may demand that they care for hand and foot if the virus, at last, lays them low.
The family’s physician will oversee the family’s care. They may initially see them in person; they’ll diagnose and prescribe treatments known to work. Similarly, the public health officer is the public’s doctor. And so you’d think the public would listen to their doctor.
But just like people ignore their family physician, so, too, the public either didn’t hear the public health doctors, listened for a while then tuned them out, or are hopping mad for their slow, inadequate responses. Anyone who has a brain injury—any chronic illness—knows how doctors don’t listen well, don’t communicate well, and call it “non-compliance” when the patient returns the favour of not listening. Experts followed the centuries-old routes for communicating with patients and controlling a pandemic. They ended up flopping like fish on land.
NEUROANDRAGOGY combines the elements of neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy with current knowledge on adult education….adults’ teaching process should be based on information of brain working and changes in it at different stages of human life. Neuroandragogy Against Exclusion
We need experts on adult education because pandemic experts failed in educating the public, listening to concerns, responding compassionately, and communicating clearly. Doubling down on not listening, they now demand vaccine passports, certain in their assumption that the only ones not being vaccinated are “anti-vaxxers.”
Neuroandragogy is perceived as a very effective strategy in adult education because it is based on proven results of research on the cognitive processes in the brain and on verified knowledge on psychophysical functioning of an adult.
Instead of learning better ways to engage the public—instead of leaning on the expertise of adult educators to teach and bring people onside—epidemiologists and infectious disease experts hardened back into the pre-pandemic stance that science is certain and cannot be questioned. That was untrue back then; still untrue.
Good science explores, keeps an open mind, acknowledges and studies the unexpected, which creates trust. It always leads to more questions.
With climate change and human incursions into the wilderness, more pandemics are coming our way. And this pandemic is morphing, creating an air of mistrust. We need a better way to live in this radically changed world we’ve created.
Just like a person with brain injury must grapple with normal is gone, so must the public and governments come to accept that pre-pandemic life is over. Like brain injury, doctors must learn to listen to their suffering patients, so experts and public health doctors actually hear the public’s grief. Just like the law requires the state to accommodate a disability, so must the state accommodate, through funding and collaboration, a different way of living.
We need leadership that unites.
We need governments to support all—a physically, mentally, socioeconomically healthy population resists viruses better.
We need physicians and scientists to explore neuroandragogy.
And to combat viral-caused brain injury, we need physicians to diagnose and treat brain injury using 21st-century neuroscience and neurostimulation instead of staying comfortable in strategies, expensive scans, and dismissive attitudes to modalities like brain biofeedback. If the current attitude toward brain injury care remains too many with Long Covid will remain permanently disabled, affecting economies and societal health.
We need brilliant minds to figure out a new way to live in a pandemic beyond quarantines, isolations, and vaccines. These measures will not work as well when in a permanent state of being as epidemics and pandemics cycle in and out. For the public, living under non-vaccine conditions for even a month is an eternity. Mismanaging lockdowns, masks, quarantines lead to the current revolt. We consider ourselves an advanced society compared to a century ago, so why can’t we figure out a new way to stop viral transmission between people?
Copyright ©️2021 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy.
