NEWSDAY · That difficult vaccination conversation: BitDepth1334 Narration

THREE WEEKS ago I had a long talk with someone about vaccination. It took two days, with a booster last week.

My electrician is an absolute professional, careful and conscientious with his work.

On the first day of working on a project, a mention about vaccination led him to offer a quietly impassioned rejection of the jab.

I try not to be an evangelist in matters that align with personal beliefs, declining to duel over intractable matters like religion and politics. The world is big enough and diverse enough for deeply held beliefs to coexist.

Except when the world isn't big enough and opinion diversity is levelled by a virus that cares nothing about our differences or beliefs, storming ahead with a determination to replicate and spread until it touches everyone, far too many of them mortally.

Over that two-hour, languid chat, I explained what I knew of the covid19 vaccine, the talk rolling back and forth agreeably and apparently with little effect.

Bombers in WWII were being shot down in alarming numbers on missions to Germany, so British command began inspecting the aircraft returning from missions, mapping bullet holes.

The plan was to fortify the areas where the holes were most prevalent until a Hungarian-Jewish refugee scientist, Abraham Wald, pointed out that the exact opposite was needed.

The maps of damage that had been so carefully prepared identified all the places a bomber could be hit and return home. What needed to be armoured was everything else, an analysis that became known as survivor bias.

That story is a reminder that when everyone is looking at the same data from the same perspective, the groupthink can smother the obvious.

Recent urgings and threats to the public to be vaccinated have only led to an uptick in booster shots being administered, with first vaccinations flatlined.

The biggest red flag of all isn't the saturation of the parallel healthcare system, it is the end of mortuary space. This country no longer has the capacity to store its dead before a funeral.

There has been little explanation of the background of research that bega