Coronavirus: rumors and speculations
Habib Ullah
These days our planet is under the calamitous effects of severe intimidations. These threats could be sensed in the form of numerous natural disasters, such as earthquake, storms, frequent deluges, and famine due to incessant drought conditions, global warming and some contagious global pandemics. Though the environmental related issues are generated by the humans’ brutal activities in the form of deforestation, deteriorating environmental policies, obsolete industrialization and overuse of luxurious appliances such as air conditioners and automobiles, however, pragmatic steps should be envisaged by the intellectuals, adroit and erudite segment of the society to mitigate the havoc of the later. This will save the masses from the untoward consequences especially the downtrodden segment of the society.
Along these, there are a cluster of barricades to hamper the human development. But recently Covid-19 drastically reshaped the world by posing prodigious loss to world frugality, and the WHO estimated that it would inject $ 8000 billion to the world economy, and argued that years will be required for vaccine preparation. The scarcity of effective medicine and the time span required to discover an efficient vaccine daunt, resent and dishearten the people particularly those on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, who work on daily wages. The contagious nature of the virus further sprinkled oil on the situation to be worsen, although, in our country the situation is not much alarming as could be seen in Europe and the USA.
Now what is our approach in tackling the post viral era? Is it empirical, rational and scientific? As a huge chunk of our population is orthodox, marginalized, uneducated and lacking the capability to sense the scenario by themselves, therefore, they are not sometime properly led by the so-called analysts and intellectuals, and used them to follow their self-created theories. For instance, many people claimed that the outbreak is intentional and created by the west to accomplish their goals of conquering the world, while some state that actually there is no viral outbreak in Pakistan, but the Government wants to avail some foreign aid and endeavoring to get some compensation in foreign debts.
Anyhow, this is the reaction of a common man, but some of our high rated journalists and anchor persons also hold the view that this is a third world war, and the superpowers are in a proxy war with one another using the virus as a biological weapon. They might be true but is there any momentous, integral and empirical evidence? Are their evidences have been put on ground realities? How long we (Muslims) will follow the world? And when we will produce a genuine, long seeing and scientific minded leadership leading us on modern and scholarly principles and to legislate and enact rules and regulations on scientific basis?
To eradicate such sort of exaggerations and misconceptions we should shift from these concocted theories to realities and this is only possible if we adopt the scientific way. For this purpose, the Muslim world should invest a huge chunk of money to uplift and enhance their education especially higher education. The authentic and applied work needs expensive machineries and skilled work force. For example, if we could not even sequence the DNA how we could establish an idea about the virus whether it was spread from a wild meat market or spread intentionally by the human. It will enable us to use our own data and then to make a very sophisticated, scholarly and comprehensive narrative in all aspects. Otherwise we will blindly follow the world and will be miles away from the ground reality.
As we know, Pakistan has a central role in the Muslim world and no doubt having the required ability and brain to conduct and establish high level research institutions, but it has financial impediments. For this purpose, a well-managed and coordinated effort is need of the day amongst the Muslim states. Some strong Muslim economies backed by oil export should come forth to support Pakistan and should focus intensely on research by their own as well. Because, this is very time consuming, expensive, arduous and laborious process, therefore, tremendous patience and perseverance would be required to accomplish it.
And this is the only way we could succeed in the provision of correct, concrete, practical and authentic informations to our citizens and to incorporate our thoughts scientifically to lead our nation, otherwise we will blindly follow the world. The quality research is more magnificent option with us to brake and uncover any chicanery, plan and mischief against the Muslim world.
The writer is a Ph.D scholar at Sun Yat-sen University, China. He can be contacted at: habibullahosakai@gmail.com.
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