Go Lean…Caribbean

Go Lean Commentary

To be or not to be; that is the question – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Is it worth it to “hang in there”? This is a question for us in the Caribbean as well. The world is enduring the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic crisis; it is wreaking havoc on the world’s economic engines – $250 Billion a day in losses – and Public Health deliveries. The only hope is a vaccine, of which there are a number of them in development (Phase I – Test Tubes, Phase II – Lab Mice, Phase III – Human Trials). Around $10bn is being spent on finding a vaccine for this Coronavirus.

Will you consume or ingest the eventual vaccine?

Will you allow your children to ingest? What percentage of people in the community will refuse to ingest?

What if consumption is a prerequisite for work, school, church, travel, etc.?

To be or not to be; that is the question
To be or not to be’ is a soliloquy of Hamlet’s – meaning that although he is speaking aloud to the audience none of the other characters can hear him. Soliloquies were a convention of Elizabethan plays where characters spoke their thoughts to the audience. Hamlet says ‘To be or not to be’ because he is questioning the value of life and asking himself whether it’s worthwhile hanging in there. He is extremely depressed at this point and fed up with everything in the world around him, and he is contemplating putting an end to himself. – Source
——
See Hamlet’s full Soliloquy in the Appendix below.

Do you want cultural suicide or do you want to be a part of the future world?

Please note: You will not be a Guinea Pig; those were the rodent-like creatures that functioned as Lab Mice. Also, you are not a part of the Human Trials. So at the point that the vaccine offer is made to you, many iterations of Quality Assurance would have already been executed.

When exactly will a vaccine be ready?

We are not certain of the Day/Time, but we can say SOON. See this VIDEO as it  addresses this and other related issues:

VIDEO – Covid-19: When will a vaccine be ready? | The Economist – https://youtu.be/FgR6t7vQtn8

The Economist
Posted August 14, 2020 – Around $10bn is being spent on finding a vaccine for coronavirus—it’s not nearly enough. And even when a covid-19 vaccine is found how should it be distributed fairly? Our experts answer your questions.

00:00 Covid-19: When will a vaccine be ready?
00:50 Will there ever be a “silver-bullet” vaccine?
01:41 How long would it take for the whole world to be vaccinated?
02:25 Who benefits financially from the vaccine?
03:54 How much will each vaccine cost?
05:10 What percentage of Americans do you estimate will choose not to get vaccinated & how much of an issue will this be?
06:44 In an ideal world, how should a vaccine be optimally distributed?
07:21 Will new versions of the vaccine be required periodically?
07:54 Will developing countries receive equal access to the vaccine, or will they be left behind?
08:50 Should richer countries pay for vaccines in the developing world?
10:01 How should we respond to crises like this one in the future?

Further reading:
Find The Economist’s most recent coverage of covid-19 here: https://econ.st/3iwmMMH

Sign up to The Economist’s daily newsletter to keep up to date with our latest covid-19 coverage: https://econ.st/2Ckne0X

Listen to “The Intelligence” podcast about the vaccine candidates and equitable distribution: https://econ.st/3aqh4Jl

How the world can think better about catastrophic and existential risks: https://econ.st/2CqYN28

Read our leader on how people must adapt to living in the covid-19 pandemic era: https://econ.st/3gSw0SS

How SARS-CoV-2 causes disease and death in covid-19: https://econ.st/33S1jcU

Covid-19 testing labs are being overwhelmed: https://econ.st/3iDGMx1

How the pandemic has shown the urgency of reforming care for the elderly: https://econ.st/2XUqfgh

Read about the hunt for the origins of covid-19: https://econ.st/3iAoX1L

This commentary addresses the Pandemic Playbook for the Caribbean region – asserting that it should include vaccines. This continues the Teaching Series for the month of August 2020 on the subject of Pandemic Playbooks – the need for them and the deficiency there of in the Caribbean. This is entry 5-of-6 from the movement behind the 2013 book Go Lean…Caribbean. The other commentaries in the series are cataloged as follows:

1. Pandemic Playbook: Worldwide Leadership – Plan ==> Actual
2. Pandemic Playbook: Caribbean Inadequacies – Missing the Bubble Opportunities
3. Pandemic Playbook: Bahamas Example – ‘Too Little Too Late’
4. Pandemic Playbook: Only at the Precipice ENCORE
5. Pandemic Playbook: To Be or Not To Be – COVID Vaccine
6. Pandemic Playbook: Success – Looks like New Zealand

A big area of consideration must be past history:

• COVID-19 is not the first pandemic
• COVID-19 immunization would not be the first vaccine

What lessons can we learn from past considerations of this “To Be or Not To Be” vaccine drama?

Let’s consider the historicity (good, bad and ugly) of the Polio vaccine and the Lead Researcher Dr. Jonas Salk; see here:

Title 1: Polio Vaccine

During the early 1950s, polio rates in the U.S. were above 25,000 annually; in 1952 and 1953, the U.S. experienced an outbreak of 58,000 and 35,000 polio cases, respectively, up from a typical number of some 20,000 a year, with deaths in those years numbering 3,200 and 1,400.^[62] Amid this U.S. polio epidemic, millions of dollars were invested in finding and marketing a polio vaccine by commercial interests, including Lederle Laboratories in New York under the direction of H. R. Cox. Also working at Lederle was Polish-born virologist and immunologist Hilary Koprowski of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, who tested the first successful polio vaccine, in 1950.^[8][41] His vaccine, however, being a live attenuated virus taken orally, was still in the research stage and would not be ready for use until five years after Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine (a dead-virus injectable vaccine) had reached the market. Koprowski’s attenuated vaccine was prepared by successive passages through the brains of Swiss albino mice. By the seventh passage, the vaccine strains could no longer infect nervous tissue or cause paralysis. After one to three further passages on rats, the vaccine was deemed safe for human use.^[39][63] On 27 February 1950, Koprowski’s live, attenuated vaccine was tested for the first time on an 8-year-old boy living at Letchworth Village, an institution for the physically and mentally disabled located in New York. After the child suffered no side effects, Koprowski enlarged his experiment to include 19 other children.^[39][64]

Jonas Salk
The first effective polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by Jonas Salk and a team at the University of Pittsburgh that included Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and Lorraine Friedman, which required years of subsequent testing. Salk went on CBS radio to report a successful test on a small group of adults and children on 26 March 1953; two days later, the results were published in JAMA.^[57] Leone N. Farrell invented a key laboratory technique that enabled the mass production of the vaccine by a team she led in Toronto.^[65][66] Beginning 23 February 1954, the vaccine was tested at Arsenal Elementary School and the Watson Home for Children in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.^[67]

Salk’s vaccine was then used in a test called the Francis Field Trial, led by Thomas Francis, the largest medical experiment in history at that time. The test began with about 4,000 children at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia,^[68][69] and eventually involved 1.8 million children, in 44 states from Maine to California.^[70] By the conclusion of the study, roughly 440,000 received one or more injections of the vaccine, about 210,000 children received a placebo, consisting of harmless culture media, and 1.2 million children received no vaccination and served as a control group, who would then be observed to see if any contracted polio.^[39] The results of the field trial were announced 12 April 1955 (the tenth anniversary of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose paralytic illness was generally believed to have been caused by polio). The Salk vaccine had been 60–70% effective against PV1 (poliovirus type 1), over 90% effective against PV2 and PV3, and 94% effective against the development of bulbar polio.^[71] Soon after Salk’s vaccine was licensed in 1955, children’s vaccination campaigns were launched. In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957.^[72] By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States.^[73]

Safety incidents

In April 1955, soon after mass polio vaccination began in the US, the Surgeon General began to receive reports of patients who contracted paralytic polio about a week after being vaccinated with Salk polio vaccine from Cutter pharmaceutical company, with the paralysis limited to the limb the vaccine was injected into. In response the Surgeon General pulled all polio vaccine made by Cutter Laboratories from the market, but not before 250 cases of paralytic illness had occurred. Wyeth polio vaccine was also reported to have paralyzed and killed several children. It was soon discovered that some lots of Salk polio vaccine made by Cutter and Wyeth had not been properly inactivated, allowing live poliovirus into more than 100,000 doses of vaccine. In May 1955, the National Institutes of Health and Public Health Services established a Technical Committee on Poliomyelitis Vaccine to test and review all polio vaccine lots and advise the Public Health Service as to which lots should be released for public use. These incidents reduced public confidence in polio vaccine leading to a drop in vaccination rates.^[76]

Source: Retrieved August 29, 2020 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#1950%E2%80%931955

Is there an alternative to taking a vaccine?

Yes, there is herd or community immunity – where if enough people are vaccinated, like 70 percent – then the rest will automatically benefit from the protections.

But don’t get it twisted! The Caribbean member-states boast a Service industrial economy – tourism. To participate in this industry space will require compliance. Tourists – by air for resort-based stay-overs or cruise line passengers – will not want to expose themselves to possible infections.

Lastly, individuals can simply chose to exit societal functioning – a self-imposed quarantine; think: Leper Colony. These ones will have to take a seat – with a view – and watch life pass them by.

Is this what you want for yourself, your family and your community? If you chose NO VACCINE, you have that right. But your children may choose differently. Especially those children that you invested so selflessly to get advanced education – college graduates. Already, this population have a higher than normal abandonment rate in the region.

One report estimates 70 percent of college educated Caribbean citizens have fled and live abroad in the Diaspora:

Caribbean loses more than 70 percent of tertiary educated to Brain Drain
According to the analysis by the Inter-American Development Bank, the people in the “Caribbean 6” countries, including the Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago have wasted money on educating their populations, especially tertiary (college) education. …

The Go Lean book posits that the Caribbean is the greatest address in the world. So why would people want to leave? The book answers by relating “push” and “pull” factors. Push, in that the dire economic conditions in the Caribbean homeland, plus governmental failures in response, caused responsible people to look elsewhere to fulfill their responsibilities and aspirations. On the other hand, pull factors came from the geo-political circumstances in the world. … Many West Indians were attracted by these better prospects in what was often referred to as the mother country. …

The Caribbean region features the world’s best address. The world should be beating down the doors to come to the Caribbean, not the Caribbean people beating down doors to get out.

“To be or not to be? That is the question” …

There must be a Pandemic Playbook for inclusion and participation in the COVID-19 vaccine race.

We must have a seat at the table or we will be “on the menu“.

The Go Lean roadmap promotes, plans and prepares for that inclusion and participation.

We want to start early in the participation cycle; the Go Lean roadmap calls for the full strategies, tactics and implementations for Research & Development. We also want full participation with Disaster (as in pandemic) Preparation & Response. These participations had already been embedded in this roadmap for reforming and transforming the Caribbean. These prime drivers are part of the vision for a Pandemic Playbook. These participations were presented as part of the New Guards for Homeland Security and Public Safety in the Caribbean region.

See the vision for Caribbean Research & Development (R&D) plus Disaster Preparation (and Response) as presented in previous blog-commentaries; consider this sample:

The Coronavirus COVID-19 virus is the master; we are all just slaves, doing the master’s bidding.

Wanna take back control?
Vaccine or bust!

We have no other choice but to contend with these challenges that come with participating in a vaccine program.

We need this strategy in our Pandemic Playbook. A requirement for Good Governance mandates that we capitulate with one or many of these vaccines that have been researched and developed; lives and livelihoods are stake. Next time – and there will be a next time – we need our own people doing the research & the development.

We urge all Caribbean stakeholders – governments, citizens, doctors and patients – to participate in the global quest to eradicate this pandemic. This is the roadmap for making the Caribbean homeland a better place to live, work, heal and play. Jonas Salk did it with Polio … eventually; we can too. So our vision, this quest is conceivable, believable and achievable. 🙂

About the Book
The book Go Lean…Caribbean serves as a roadmap for the introduction and implementation of the technocratic Caribbean Union Trade Federation (CU), for the elevation of Caribbean society – for all member-states. This CU/Go Lean roadmap has these 3 prime directives:

• Optimization of the economic engines in order to grow the regional economy to $800 Billion & create 2.2 million new jobs.
• Establishment of a security apparatus to ensure public safety and protect the resultant economic engines.
• Improve Caribbean governance to support these engines, including a separation-of-powers between the member-states and CU federal agencies.

The Go Lean book provides 370-pages of turn-by-turn instructions on “how” to adopt new community ethos, plus the strategies, tactics, implementations and advocacies to execute so as to reboot, reform and transform the societal engines of Caribbean society.

Download the free e-Book of Go Lean … Caribbean – now!

Who We Are
The movement behind the Go Lean book – a non-partisan, apolitical, religiously-neutral Community Development Foundation chartered for the purpose of empowering and re-booting economic engines – stresses that reforming and transforming the Caribbean societal engines must be a regional pursuit. This was an early motivation for the roadmap, as pronounced in the opening Declaration of Interdependence (Pages 11 – 13):

ix. Whereas the realities of healthcare and an aging population cannot be ignored and cannot be afforded without some advanced mitigation, the Federation must arrange for health plans to consolidate premiums of both healthy and sickly people across the wider base of the entire Caribbean population. The mitigation should extend further to disease management …

x. Whereas we are surrounded and allied to nations of larger proportions in land mass, populations, and treasuries, elements in their societies may have ill-intent in their pursuits, at the expense of the safety and security of our citizens. We must therefore appoint “new guards” to ensure our public safety and threats against our society, both domestic and foreign. …

xi. Whereas all men are entitled to the benefits of good governance in a free society, “new guards” must be enacted to dissuade the emergence of incompetence, corruption, nepotism and cronyism at the peril of the people’s best interest. The Federation must guarantee the executions of a social contract between government and the governed.

xii. Whereas the legacy in recent times in individual states may be that of ineffectual governance with no redress to higher authority, the accidence of this Federation will ensure accountability and escalation of human and civil rights of the people for good governance, justice assurances, due process and the rule of law. As such, any threats of a “failed state” status for any member state must enact emergency measures on behalf of the Federation to protect the human, civil and property rights of the citizens, residents, allies, trading partners, and visitors of the affected member state and the Federation as a whole.

xvi. Whereas security of our homeland is inextricably linked to prosperity of the homeland, the economic and security interest of the region needs to be aligned under the same governance. Since economic crimes … can imperil the functioning of the wheels of commerce for all the citizenry, the accidence of this Federation must equip the security apparatus with the tools and techniques for predictive and proactive interdictions.

Sign the petition to lean-in for this roadmap for the Caribbean Union Trade Federation.

————————

Appendix – Hamlet’s Soliloquy

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

Source: Retrieved Aigust 29, 2020 from: https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/soliloquies/to-be-or-not-to-be/#:~:text=To%20be%20or%20not%20to%20be’%20is%20a%20soliloquy%20of,other%20characters%20can%20hear%20him.&text=Hamlet%20says%20’To%20be%20or,it’s%20worthwhile%20hanging%20in%20there.