NOTHING FOR SURE!

I am an adjunct physics professor at the local community college and I tell my students that in science, we know nothing for sure! You can verify a theory over, and over, and over again. But then one day, in a year or a thousand years, you perform another experiment that has results that your theory does not explain. It is now time to adapt the theory or throw it out. You just never know if and when that one experiment that refutes the theory will occur. I will say that one of the few theories that have stood the test of time and is called a law is Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity. Gravity has never failed to work the same way as of yet!

This is why the medical experts, yes, Dr. Fauci is an expert, have revised their theories concerning the COVID19 virus over the course of the last two years. A theory is proposed, it works for a while, and then it needs to be revised based on new data. We know nothing for SURE!

In science, we look for patterns and trends to help us understand what’s going on. That pattern could be what the majority of data says, or it could be that outlier piece of data. The history of vaccinations begins with the history of smallpox, a disease that has plagued us around the world since 10,000 BC. Smallpox cases appear in Chinese writings as early as 1100 BC.

In the late 1700s, smallpox was ravaging England. Edward Jenner noticed that there was a specific group that was not contracting smallpox like the general public. That group was the milkmaids. upon further study, he discovered that the milkmaids were contracting a milder version of smallpox called cowpox. This was immunizing them against the more virulent smallpox. To test his theory, he administered a small amount of liquid from a lesion of cowpox into an opening on a healthy person. That person contracted cowpox, had mild symptoms, and recovered quickly, fully immunized against smallpox. Edward Jenner has been called the father of vaccinations. The word vaccination is from vacca, Latin for cow.