I’m going to get another shot. A Covid vaccination. Don’t know if it really helps or not, but I figure: what doesn’t freeze can’t thaw. Yes, I think that’s a Cruyffian expression, because you have to be careful when you talk about something like Covid.

Entire families have been torn apart, friendships ended. We’ve even invented a whole new type of person: the wappie. That’s what we call people in the Netherlands who see a conspiracy behind everything. A wappie is convinced that Covid was part of an international conspiracy against humanity.

Actually, I think so too. Only my suspects aren’t aliens, Bill Gates or the Chinese. My suspect is nature.

Okay, I’ll be careful again. There are people who don’t believe Covid probably jumped from animals to humans. That Ebola and Covid probably came from bats, or that HIV once crossed over from chimpanzees. And there are people who think we should feel sorry for those animals, because they can’t help it either. Fair enough. But another virus could pop up any moment. Covid-29 or Covid-39, maybe?

Covid caused enormous misery. So did a lot of the measures. People couldn’t say goodbye to their dying mother or father. Kids fell behind at school. Long Covid, which some people still have. And in poor countries poverty got even worse, if that was possible.

Not everyone suffered, though. In 2022, Pfizer made almost $38 billion in revenue from its Covid vaccine. Just that vaccine. Paxlovid, its Covid pill, brought in another $19 billion. Revenue, not profit, I know. And yes, plenty of public money went into it. BioNTech, Pfizer’s German partner, got 375 million euros from Berlin. Rich countries ordered billions’ worth of doses before anyone knew if the stuff worked. No, they didn’t skip the safety tests. Just to be clear, for the wappies among us.

Me, I’m on shot number four or five. In May 2022, in the poorest countries, 16 percent of people had had one. One! Rich countries had hoarded the stuff. And the pharma companies? Sharing their recipe so others could make it too? Not really their thing.

Have we learned anything from it? I’m not so sure. And the next virus may already be out there somewhere.

Back to nature’s conspiracy. Have you ever seen a barn with a hundred thousand chickens in it? Or pigs packed so tightly they can barely turn around? Nothing natural about it. We’ve turned animals into meat factories that have to deliver as much as possible for as little money as possible. And every now and then nature hits back, with bird flu, swine flu or mad cow disease.

We’re all walking around with PFAS and microplastics in our bodies. Stuff we dumped into the environment ourselves, and now nature is happily serving it back to us. Here in the Netherlands we’re even advised not to eat the eggs from our own backyard chickens. We don’t drop dead from it. Not right away. Ask me again in twenty years.

And the forests. We chop them down for soy, cattle, roads, mines, whatever. Then we act surprised when the rain stops and the weather goes crazy.

So maybe it really is a conspiracy. Bats, chickens, pigs and mosquitoes all agreeing to wipe us out. AI will give them a hand. :-)

In 2125 people will shake their heads at how we treated animals. We stuffed billions of them into barns, cut down forests for their feed and, whenever something nasty broke out, reached for the vaccine. That the one might have something to do with the other didn’t occur to us. Or it did, and we ignored it.

Funny thing is, there’s already a name for doing it differently. One Health. The WHO is in on it, with the FAO, UNEP and the World Organisation for Animal Health. Their message boils down to this: keep the animals healthy and leave their habitat alone, and you’ll get sick less often yourself. Vaccines are fine. Maybe also ask why the next epidemic keeps coming.

Pretty logical, really. Still, we keep cramming animals into barns and clearing forests for their feed. Maybe the wappies are right after all, and there really is a conspiracy. Only we’re in on it ourselves.

Back From The Future is a series of short stories in which I look back from the year 2125 at the world we are creating today.