Fear Factor: Ophidiophobia

"I HATE SNAKES!" INDIANA JONES

He was the archeologist who every nerd wanted to be in the 1980s, fighting Nazis, searching for religious artifacts, and his dad was Sean Connery, but the leather jacket cool former pilot of the Millenium Falcon, MF for short, had only one fear in the world: snakes, which probably resonated with one in five kids in high school and one in ten American adults, as it is the most common specific phobia, second only two guess what: public speaking, higher than fear of heights and spiders, and at least the folks at Gallup Polls knew this marketing intelligence by the beginning of the current century, like folks at the Scientific American knew by 2018 that two thirds of our spiritual but not religious population, who may, not afraid to burn in Hell, reject God, church and religion, like Don Beyer's kids, a source of pride for their father, and like in the year before the pandemic, the Religious Repression Project had determined that, of 318,000 American Christian churches, only about 60,000 possessed an online capability, that a break in the habit of regular worship was the signature sign of departing a faith community and the words that pastors used most, as well as the words that resonated best with their congregations. According to Sun Tsu, as any tactical intelligence analyst worth his salt can tell you, said: the battle is won before it is fought.

Pandemics are historically associated with fear, confusion and despair, as noted by the Data Institute at the University of San Francisco, in research upon which the nation's only physician serving as a state governor, Ralph Northam, M.D., had relied for the nonmedical grade facial coverings mandate, ignoring the 2010 NIOSH study that had determined, with the same diagnostic equipment that is used to rate the N95, that substitutes for medical grade protection were wholly ineffective, a finding that was not overruled by the WHO hasty review of observational studies completed after May 3, 2020, and that stated that 12 to 16 layer cotton surgical masks may not prevent infection from COVID-19, or to use the words of a Florida judge, they do not "sanitize", a matter in which one pandemic litigator will intervene as soon as Attorney General Merrick Garland and the CDC try to appeal the recent ruling.

But how about the symbols more important than the face diapers to remind everyone of the pandemic to compel compliance, under the UNESCO precautionary principle, a doctrine expressly rejected by American courts in Sancho v. Department of Energy? The caduceus, the winged staff with two serpents? As Doc Northam said: "Symbols are important."

King Cobra Venom, or KCV, is found in snakes in Indonesia and China, which have the most lethal venom, but any scientist measures lethality by comparing the amount of venom neutralized by antivenom, or like taking the infectious dose and relating it to correlates of protection in attempting to develop an effective, and not just efficacious, vaccine. And for KCV, that formulaic expression is "118 mg venom neutralized per g antivenom" which equals the median lethal dose (LD), or about one sixteenth of a tablespoon to paralyze a mouse. Are you a man or a mouse? Speak up, because I can't hear you through your face diaper, socially distanced and fully vaccinated.

And did you hear the one about the Ph.D. who suffered an adverse event after being vaccinated? It was a "stroke of genius." Padunk. Dunk.