Do the right thing

I do hope the scientists studying COVID 19 are smarter than Burt the turtle.

For those unfamiliar with the loveable turtle, he starred in the government’s 1950s program to convince young and old to duck and cover when the bomb comes.

A public service ad advised that atomic bombs are like fires or car accidents and that America could be ready.

“If there is a warning you’ll hear it before the bomb explodes. A bomb might explode where there are no grown-ups near. We must be ready every day all the time to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes. Stay covered until the danger is over,” was the sage advice.

Spoiler alert. Duck and cover would only keep people from seeing themselves get deep fried. People actually believed the turtle. Things haven’t changed much.

I’ll play the role of skeptic only to remind people that the world may not be as it seems and that promises for solutions may prove wrong. That is not to say that there have been discoveries that have shaped the world. But there also have been many grand mistakes.

Many Americans believe that really bad things, like a pandemic or a Japanese attack, don’t happen here. With the war raging in Europe and the bombs falling on London, many Americans did not believe that war was inevitable. Less than three weeks before Christmas, 1941, Pearl harbor was attacked and the next day the U.S. declared war. So much for the ostrich.

As far as trusting our leaders to do the right thing in times of crisis, history is littered with screw-ups of historical proportions.

There was the little known “War of the Oaken Bucket” fought in 1325 between the Italian states, Bologna and Modena. The war that killed 2,000 people started because soldiers from Modena took a bucket from Bologna’s town well.

The Pig War was nearly fought in 1859 over San Juan Island between the U.S. and Canada’s Vancouver Island. The island was shared by American settlers and the British Hudson Bay Company. Tensions boiled over when an American farmer shot a British boar for tearing up his potato crop. War was narrowly averted when the powerful Royal Navy arrived.

The War of the Stray Dog in 1925 pitted Greeks against Bulgarians. It started after a dog that got away from a Greek soldier. The soldier chased the dog across the Greek border with Bulgaria. Bulgarian border guards then shot the Greek. Again war was averted only with the intervention of the League of Nations.

While scientists are well-meaning, they have been dead wrong many times in the past. There were times when bad advice was accepted, like bleeding, and good advice was ridiculed, like handwashing in medical facilities.

The 19th century scientist was Ignaz Semmelweis was ridiculed by his peers and it took many years for the medical community to accept his theories about handwashing and germs.

Another example. Incubators are standard equipment in neonatal intensive care units but for years after incubators were made, the only place they were found was at amusement parks and “sideshows” alongside tattooed ladies and sword swallowers.

And Peyton Rous was mocked when he demonstrated in 1911 that cancer could be transmitted by a virus. At the time, viruses were not well understood and critics claimed that the tumor examined by Rous was not caused by the virus identified by Rous but was actually more like an inflammation.

And of course there was the case of Louis Pasteur who demonstrated the role of micro-organisms in disease. It took some time before the medical brains of the day saw that Pasteur was on to something very big.

And then there are the situations that proved to be just wrong. For instance, Pediatricians had told parents to keep babies away from peanuts for the first three years of life. It has been proven that peanut allergies occur whether or not a child is exposed to peanuts before age 3.

Another common fallacy is that fish oil reduces the risk of heart disease. That longstanding belief was brought into question by a trial that involved 12,500 people at risk for heart trouble. They were given daily omega-3 supplements or fish oil and it did not protect against heart disease.

Ginkgo biloba has been marketed as a way to protect against memory loss and dementia. Sorry, but a large federal study, published in 2008, showed the ginkgo biloba supplement does nothing to stem either memory loss or dementia.

And there was the mother of all mistakes by people who thought they knew what they were doing. That would be Christopher Columbus who sailed westward from Spain in 1492, convinced that he was less than 3,000 miles away from Japan. Sorry, it was not quite that way and still isn’t.