Dear Editor,

The sciences, including the health sciences, are most vulnerable when they face the uncertain and the uncontrollable.

The health and wellness ministry ‘s warning that the dengue outbreak could last into 2024 could be our authorities conceding to this vulnerability. Furthermore, it is quite unusual for this Jamaica Labour Party (JLP)-led Administration to be so conservative in its projections. Although the authorities’ efforts have been valid as it relates to public education and measures to combat mosquito-breeding, appropriate/inappropriate medications, and strategies for countering dehydration as it relates to dengue, there still remains that vulnerability, which is where God comes in. Consider the three following.

In Jamaican and internationally acclaimed singer Marcia Griffiths’s song Fire Burning she sings that “if the sign is on your door, then you will be safe for sure”. She actually borrowed this from biblical scriptures, which describe the Lord’s “passover”, when all the first born in the land of biblical Egypt were to die by the hand of God, except for those (Israelites) who had put a “token” upon their houses.

Secondly, it was only about two months ago that an inspired “woman of God”, during her sermon, revealed to the congregation to which she preached, nearly breaking down in mourning, that she had a vision of hospitals islandwide being filled to capacity with ailing children, and there was tremendous suffering among them.

Lastly, during the heights of COVID-19, after the vaccines were just approved by the authorities, a Bermudian immunologist’s presentation on how the immune system, COVID-19, and the vaccine work was televised on local television. However, he was so focused on convincing his viewers of the “virtues” of the COVID-19 vaccine, reinforcing the army-like operations of the immune system, that he failed to indicate that this army can oftentimes become rogue and mutinous and may orchestrate a “coup” on the body’s systems. And because of the immune system’s evolved versatility (training), it can mimic, inhibit, or enhance any bodily function in the execution of its orders. It is in doing this that the body’s own immune system can make a dengue patient “roast” with fever for weeks and have blood-clotting irregularities, diminished thirst and appetite, rashes, and other signs of an immune response.

Just as with the Israelites, who the Lord’s plague passed over, it was not prayers and fasting which spared. And now it will not be a mark made with sheep’s or goat’s blood that shall spare, as it was back then, it will be that which God has given us to regulate our immune system — vitamin D.

If only the authorities would use the same emergency powers and funds that they squandered on COVID-19 to promote this so that every doctor is required to prescribe this vitamin to suspected COVID-19, dengue, Chik V, swine flu, or any other of those “nasty” viruses, and even making it available for free in the public health facilities, then we would have spared the nation’s children from not only death and suffering in the present, but from the resulting and delayed autoimmune complications, such as type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc.

Andre O Sheppy

Norwood Meadows

astrangely@outlook.com