There is yet another troubling point regarding herd immunization. This point concerns projections into the future. We are faced with the unknown about whether self-immunization is permanent—and if any vaccine can promise life-long (or even long-term) immunity. Can the virus transform itself and successfully assault one’s body once again? And what about the false positives—the occasional false assessment of one’s immunization? We faced many complex problems regarding testing of COVID-19. VUCA Plus is fully present in the world of COVID-19. Decisions regarding how best to monitor this virus and the ways that the virus is best defeated are not easily made. Blame is easy to assign and a sense of helplessness is readily evoked.
What then have we learned during the past year? In the future, how do we address complex, multi-tier pandemic issues? At the very least we know two things. First, we know that critical data must be generated and pondered regarding the ongoing status of the virus. Second, forums must be convened in which important debate regarding options can take place. As I have already noted, the data is not easy to acquire. The forum will be even harder to enact—especially if it is to be international in scope. The difficulty thus resides not only in the procurement of valid and useful information, but also in the thoughtful consideration of implications embedded in this data.
As human beings, we prefer not to consider negative options—for they create collective stress. We would prefer to isolate (censor) the inconvenient truth and demonize those who are conveying this truth. Clearly, the challenge is great of convening an international forum in which constructive dialogue takes place. In order to successfully convene this dialogue regarding future pandemic policies, we must take several factors about the human psyche into consideration. As psychologists, we might have something important to say about the process of collective (inter-societal) policy formulation. We have learned (and perhaps have always known), that medicine, mind and heart must always dance together—especially when it comes to the exceptional challenge posed by a pandemic virus.
Thinking in Systems: The Outcomes May Surprise Us
While we, homo sapiens, are among the brightest members of the animal kingdom, there are some major limits in our capacity to think clearly and systematically about the challenging conditions we face. First, we are inclined to view our complex world in single dimensions: it is hard for us to take multiple, interacting variables into account at the same time. Our colleagues at M.I.T. (just down the road from the Harvard epidemiologists) have created a powerful modeling tool called system dynamics that enables us to take multiple variables into consideration at the same time (Meadows, 2008). The modeling tools being used by their colleagues at Harvard and other universities and research centers similarly enable multi-variable analyses.
