When a vaccine for COVID-19 is as easily available as a flu shot, and when the public is comfortable getting it, it will be a time of victory — Victory Virus. And it will be a time to begin building the new America.

Things will have changed. We won’t be going back to the future. Most visible will be the disappearance of a huge number of low-end jobs. No one knows how many but, sadly, we have a good idea where it will hurt most: among semi-skilled and unskilled workers.

They are those who don’t have college degrees and those who wouldn’t have qualified to enter college. Higher education isn’t for everyone, even if money wasn’t an issue. College is for those who can handle it, therefore benefiting.

It isn’t only the virus that is changing the employment picture but also the continuing technology revolution.

Data is going to be king, according to Andres Carvallo, founder of CMG, the Austin, Texas-based technology consulting company, and a professor at Texas State University. Data, he argues, linked with the spreading fifth-generation telephone networks (5G) will delineate the future. Carvallo has pointed out that data from all sources has value, “even the homeless.”

Carvallo’s colleague on a weekly video broadcast about the digital future, entrepreneur John Butler, a University of Texas at Austin professor, believes data and 5G will start to affect American business in a big way and new business plans will emerge, taking into account the increasing deployment of sensors and the ability of 5G to move huge quantities of data at the speed of light.

Carvallo explains, “If you’re moving data at the rate of 40 megabytes per second now, with 5G you’ll be able to move it at 1,000 megabytes per second.”

The technology revolution will continue apace, but will there be a place for those who aren’t embraced by it, like those who serve, clean, pack, unpack and have been doing society’s housekeeping at the minimum wage or just above it?

Evidence is that they are already in sorry shape with a much higher rate of COVID-19 infections than the general population, and even in the best of times they have poorer health — an indictment of our health system.

The future of the neediest workers is imperiled, in the short term, because the jobs they have had and the jobs that have always been there for those on the lower ladders of employment are disappearing. A goodly chunk of these workers will be out of work for a long time.

Retraining is the solution that is advocated by those who aren’t caught in this low-level work vise. Retraining for most people is, to my mind, just a crock. It is a bromide handed down by the middle class to those below; a callow concept that doesn’t fit the bill. It soothes the well-heeled conscience.

First, some people can’t grasp new concepts, particularly as they age. Are you really going to teach a middle-age, short-order cook to navigate computer repair? That is not only impractical, it is cruel.

A further disadvantage is that the affected workers not only are going to be shut out of their traditional lines of employment but they also carry an additional burden, another barrier to retraining: They almost exclusively are the products of shoddy public education, so there is very little to build on if you’re going to retrain.

If you have marginal English, most information technology work is going to be inaccessible; rudimentary math is another stumbling block.

Very smart people are candidates for retraining. The graduate schools see plenty of students who get multiple, dissociated degrees, like lawyers who have nuclear engineering degrees. I know a prominent head of surgery at a Boston hospital who has a degree in chemical engineering. They are the polymaths, but they aren’t laboring for the minimum wage.

The loss of jobs due to COVID-19 comes at a time when technology, for the first time since the Newcomen engine kickstarted the Industrial Revolution 1712, might be a job subtractor, not the multiplier it has been down through the ages.

Unemployment insurance is a stopgap but it also obscures the full extent of the skill void, the aptitude hurdle.

History is fragile. It needs to be handled with care. The trouble is that it is inevitably viewed through the prism of today, which can cast the good as bad and the bad as good.

That is why those who would edit it, sanitize it or obscure it are, for the most part, vandals. It is in constant danger of being rewritten to accommodate current perceptions.

How has this worked? When Oscar Wilde was arrested on April 6, 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel, London, for “gross indecency” (homosexuality), he was widely denounced as a threat to everything of value and a danger to our morals. In New York, where several of his plays were packing in audiences, Wilde’s name was removed from the playbills, while the plays continued to run.

Today, those who would have him arrested would be arrested for hate speech. The prism has changed.

America’s great journalist H.L. Mencken has fallen into some disfavor because of notes in his private diaries that have been construed to be anti-Semitic and racist. But his genius is unassailable. If you doubt this, just read his work. Yet the National Press Club in Washington changed the name of its library to that of a minor benefactor because the great man in private diaries had entries that were construed to be anti-Semitic. You can find the offending sentences on the web and make your own decision about what he said to his diary in 1943.

A committee of the Council of the District of Columbia advanced a list of historical figures’ connections to slavery and oppression and recommended renaming dozens of public schools, parks and government buildings in the nation’s capital — including those named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and five other U.S. presidents. No one, it would seem, who drew breath at the time of the founding of the republic is safe from retrospective judgment and condemnation. Not even Benjamin Franklin, who told a Philadelphia matron that he had “given you a republic, if you can keep it.”

No historical figures, it would also seem, are safe from indictments leveled against them. Julius Caesar was a Roman imperialist. The French and the British should hate him. Should we therefore destroy statues of Caesar? Then we wouldn’t even know what he looked like.

English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell served as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland during the 1600s. But his actions in Ireland and Scotland were genocidal. He said of the luckless Irish at the Battle of Drogheda, “God made them as stubble to our swords.” Should his name and likeness be expunged from our public records? The Cromwell Road, one of the great thoroughfares of London would have to go. One shudders to think about the awfulness of Queen Victoria in this context.

History is dominated by great figures and they are a mixed lot. The new politically correct assessment of history extends into appending judgment of sex lives. Watch out John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and even Catherine the Great.

Sixty years ago, those who could’ve been censored and removed from public life would’ve included gays down through the centuries, from Alexander the Great to former Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who is also Muslim.

There is a lot of heavy lifting to be done if you’re going to measure the past against the values of the present.

This brings me to the difficult and contentious issue of the Confederacy and all those statues. Here, there is reason to respect the sensibilities of the African-American community and at least remove statues to museums. The Confederate flag has become an in-your-face statement of white racism and shouldn’t be part of the celebration of Southern culture. These symbols aren’t yet confined to history’s grave but are part of a struggle that isn’t settled.

Oxford University has decided to remove a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, and there is a move to change the name of Rhodes Scholarships to something else. Mind you, not to give up the money that he gave for the scholarship, together with huge gifts to the university.

Rhodes was an imperialist. He wanted Britain to rule from Cape Town to Cairo, but he wasn’t a monster. Ruthless in business, he introduced the first genuine open franchise in Cape Colony when he was prime minister. His sending of a column of police — they weren’t soldiers — into Zimbabwe ended the genocidal war between the Matabele and the Shona. But a white colony run by Whites for Whites resulted.

For me, names and statues record history. They aren’t celebrations of wrongdoing. I would’ve liked to have seen a statue of Stalin, the greatest monster of the 20th century, as he appeared to the Russian people. I think it is good when a small child asks in front of a statue, “Mom, who is that?”

History isn’t to be rewritten, but to be learned, otherwise we won’t know how we got here and what to avoid, as George Santayana pointed out.

 

 

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Photo: May 6th 2020: Statue of Edward Colston with blindfold before it was taken down by protestors

There is health in trees and a narrative in sewage. That is the double story coming out of the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute at the University of Louisville.

In Louisville, where the air quality ranks among the worst in Kentucky, the Envirome Institute is planting trees at a near manic pace, but it isn’t planning to wait years for the first payoff.

There is scientific purpose and a plan, and even the federal government is involved because, as Theodore “Ted” Smith, director of the institute’s Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil, told me, the tree-planting project, called Green Heart, is also a fully fledged clinical trial of the type normally used to assess the effect of medicines.

“Actually it’s a drug trial of sorts, except the drug is trees and bushes. You could go to clinicaltrials.gov, where all the clinical trials are listed, and under ‘drug,’ it says ‘trees,’” Smith said. “We’re taking very seriously the need to empirically demonstrate what the value of trees, bushes, greenery, nature is; what is the basis of the connection of exposure to green places and the improvement in human health.”

People living in four south Louisville neighborhoods where trees are being planted will be monitored against a control group in neighborhoods that aren’t being planted and surrounding Jefferson County. The project’s stated purpose is “testing if increasing green space in a neighborhood improves air quality and human health with the goal of developing a ‘greenprint’ for creating healthier neighborhoods.”

Aruni Bhatnagar, the institute’s director, told me that they chose to study the heart because most people die of cardiovascular disease. He said 8,000 to 10,000 trees are being planted in every available space in Louisville: open land, along roadways, and anywhere that will support trees.

The trees are already of substantial size — 15 feet to 20 feet in height — when they are transplanted in Louisville, which also has an urban blight problem. They’re planting evergreen trees because they have year-round foliage, increasing their effect.

Smith said, “We’re very hopeful that we’ll be able to shed some light on just what are the benefits of trees. Maybe it’s cooling: There are a lot of people who are concerned about heat issues in cities. We’re concerned about pollution. As a research institute, we’ve had a long track record in working on exposure to pollutants. That is one of the functions trees perform for us.”

Like all scientific institutions, said Bhatnagar, the Envirome Institute felt it should swing into action to help with COVID-19. It is doing so with a program monitoring Louisville’s sewage to determine patterns of infection and to bring these to the attention of health authorities. The wastewater is sampled at 16 locations and analyzed in the institute’s own labs to find the COVID-19 penetration.

These samplings provide a schematic. Initially, researchers found higher infections in affluent parts of Louisville. But over time, infections spread to the city’s disadvantaged and low-income neighborhoods, where they increased dramatically.

Overall, according to Smith, the wastewater monitoring will lead to a  comprehensive understanding of the health anatomy of Louisville, providing data that could have a big effect on the future health and well-being of the city and, if adopted as a general part of urban health analysis, much of the world. “There’s gold in those sewage pipes,” he quipped.

Louisville philanthropist Christina Lee Brown has been working with health activists across the world on a whole-health — physical, mental, economic, spiritual — concept for living. In the quest for sustainable, livable, enjoyable environments, Brown works closely with Britain’s Prince Charles, who has similar goals and has invested heavily in this harmony.

“We encourage people to see the interconnected nature of all the forms of health and how they reinforce and support each other,” Brown said.

Trees are not just for climbing, and sewers are talkative.

I don’t know a lot about social media. I don’t know how it works technically. I don’t know why it is such a force in society.

I don’t know why very prominent people like comedian Steve Martin, prognosticator Nate Silver and columnist Tom Friedman, who have plenty of outlets, tweet.

I don’t know why people who are great company, need to post on Facebook tedious photos of  (A) their cats, (B) their grandchildren, (C) their hobbies, and (D) their vacations — (That’s Ann and myself in a Costa Rican rainforest).

Because of this personal bric-a-brac, I tend to avoid Facebook and solicitations to befriend people there. I fear those children, that cat, those hobbies and snaps of my friends despoiling places of natural beauty.

What I do know is that we face a clear-and-present danger of social media censorship.

What makes it worse is those calling for censorship should know better. They are, many of them, of the progressive left. It seems they hate “hate speech” more than they hate anything else, including censorship by machine or, worse, censorship deep in Twitter or Facebook by committees of the nameless wonks.

Now social media is full of remarkably ugly, vicious, deranged and fabricated things. The truth isn’t safe with social media. The truth is scarcely an ingredient. But that isn’t reason enough to introduce censorship, whether self-censorship or some other adjudication of what we see and hear.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, et al. aren’t publishers. They are common carriers, like the post office, the railroads and the telephone companies. Certainly, they aren’t publishers or broadcasters in the traditional sense.

The remedy for the excess on social media — conspiracies, homophobia, Islamophobia, and even my phobia about cat photos — won’t be cured by getting the companies that carry them to introduce censorship, however well-intentioned and noble in purpose.

The right to free speech is ineradicable, absolute and cardinal. Without it we start sliding down the slippery slope — except the internet slope is steeper, greasier and globe-circling.

So, I defend President Trump, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow as having a right not to be censored. That is all I’m defending: only their right not to be censored, not their speech or even the ideas behind it.

There was a time, before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher cracked down on unions, when the printers of British national newspapers set themselves up as de facto censors.

Not the editors or owners, but the press operators: They wouldn’t print stories of which they disapproved. The newspapers were forever making statements like this: “One-third of last night’s print run was lost due to industrial action.” That meant a shop steward didn’t like the content.

The issue now revolves around hate speech, a social construct. It is, as Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That means that there can be no standard when the offense is so subjective that it is in the eye of the beholder.

The blanket indictment of hate speech, if applied to any discourse — for example, political, literary or sports — is that it can’t be conducted without the honorable traditions of wit, invective, ridicule, scorn and satire. If a sports columnist berates a fumbling NFL quarterback, is that hate speech?

Until now the laws of libel and slander have worked imperfectly, but they have done their bit to protect reputations, to halt dishonest and malicious allegations, and to give a kind of discipline, sometimes lax, to journalism.

These laws aren’t adequate for the internet, but they hint at future concepts that might endeavor to quiet the internet and its social media sewers. Censorship won’t do it with perpetrating a greater evil.

When you’ve read this, you may want to hurl used cat litter at me in the street. Your right to want to do that should be unassailable, but if you do it, you should be prosecuted for assault.

Hate is a human emotion, and emotions aren’t criminal until they’re acted on.

If you censor the internet, as many would like, the workaround will come in seconds. Social media and its sewer of disgusting, repugnant and  vile assertions won’t be silenced, but honest disputation may be banned.

Actually, I love cats.

 

 

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Photo Editorial credit: Primakov / Shutterstock.com

The Democrats, supporting in whole or in part the goals of the Green New Deal, have, one suspects, a vision of themselves facing off against an implacable opposition of energy companies and financiers committed to business as usual.

The fact is, if the Democrats win the White House in November, they may find the enemy isn’t fighting. Indeed, they may find energy producers — both oil and natural gas — and the electric utilities are no longer opponents but devout, if questioning, allies in the struggle for carbon neutrality.

And Wall Street, often identified as the evil force behind the polluters, is striving to be green, and to assess and direct the effect of their lending with a view to reducing carbon emissions and remediating them.

A remarkable organization, the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF), has enlisted top global banks and lenders in the decarbonation of the future. In the United States its partners include Amalgamated Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, BlackRock and Morgan Stanley.

A slew of banks spread across western Europe has joined PCAF, including Britain’s NatWest and Denmark’s Danske Bank. Its first task will be to develop organization-wide standards and methodology to assess the carbon impact of their lending.

Oil and gas entrepreneurs and electric utilities have long been entwined with their bankers. They need each other. It takes a lot of capital to explore for and exploit oil and gas deposits, and the electric utilities have traditionally been the most capital-intensive American industry.

So complete has been the relationship between banking and energy that American Electric Power, once the nation’s biggest electric power company, had its headquarters on Wall Street for decades before moving it to Columbus, Ohio, where its customer base is.

The Edison Electric Institute, now a fixture among the power players in Washington, was headquartered in New York City when I began writing about the utility industry in 1970. Likewise, the Atomic Industrial Forum, a forerunner of the Nuclear Energy Institute, moved to the Washington area.

When the price of oil went down suddenly in the 1980s, a bunch of Southwest banks failed. The banking-energy linkage is absolute and at heart unshakable. And it can be dynamic and progressive.

PCAF is the singular and extraordinary creation of Guidehouse, a globe-spanning environmental consulting firm. It began modestly in Holland — one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world — in 2015 and spread to banks across Europe. But its big expansion came in the last two years with the addition of the big American financial institutions and NatWest.

It won’t just be large energy investments that will be subject to scrutiny and assessment by PCAF members. “It will extend all the way down to mortgages,” Jan-Willem Bode, a Guidehouse partner based in London, told me in a guest appearance on “White House Chronicle,” the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS.

Bode said the banks want to harmonize how they measure their carbon impact and work toward investments in everything from alternative energy projects, like wind farms, to solar homes that reduce the carbon load.

Bode insisted the commitment of the partners is real. They want a decarbonized future and will favor investments which bring that about.

Of course, there will be critics aplenty. They’ll bandy about the pejorative “greenwashing” and will suggest that the companies that financed carbon production in the past are still at it.

I think they haven’t got the message: America will be greened a lot faster when big money says “green.”

Take what Citi’s CEO Michael Corbat said, “If there’s one lesson to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that economic and physical health and  resilience, our environment and our social stability are inextricably linked.”

The greenback is getting greener.

To compound the COVID-19 crisis, we have a cultural crisis. It is a crisis of our individualism.

That cultural element — precious and special, of the individual against adversity, the individual against authority, the individual against any limits imposed on free action — is at odds with the need to behave. Worse, our individualistic trait has been politicized, dragged to the right.

This aspect of American exceptionalism is now killing us, on a per capita basis, faster than people in any other country. We are in a health crisis that demands collective action from people who revere individual freedom over the dictates of the many, as expressed by the government.

Simply, we must wear masks and stay away from groups. It works; it is onerous but not intolerable.

There is a hope, almost a belief, afoot that by the end of the year there will be a vaccine, and that the existence of a vaccine will itself signal an end to the crisis.

A reality check: No proven vaccine yet exists. Although all the experts I’ve contacted believe one will work and several might.

Another reality check: It may take up to five years to vaccinate enough people to make America safe.

My informal survey of doctors finds they expect one-third of us will be keen to be vaccinated, one-third will hold back to see how it goes and one-third may resist vaccination because they’re either opposed in principle or consider it to be a government intrusion on their liberty.

If their expectation holds true, COVID-19 is going to be with us for years.

No doubt there are better therapies in the pipeline to deal with COVID-19 once the patient has reached the hospital. But that won’t affect the rate of infection. The assault on our way of life and the economy will continue; the price our children are paying now will escalate.

If you’re pinning your hopes on a vaccine, several may come along at the same time and jostle for market share.

That happened with poliomyelitis: Three vaccines were available, but one failed because of alleged poor quality control in manufacture. If there is a scramble among vaccines, look out for financial muscle, politics, and nationalism to join the fray. None of these will be helpful.

So far, there has been a catastrophic failure of leadership at the White House and in many statehouses. “Say it isn’t so” is not a policy. That is what President Donald Trump and Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia have, in essence, said — resulting in climbing infections and deaths.

Americans sacrificed on a politicized cultural altar.

We know what to do: A hard lockdown for a couple of weeks would stop the virus in its tracks. It worked in New York.

We are in a war without leadership. We have governors forced to act as guerrilla chiefs rather than generals of a national army under unified leadership with common purpose.

Right now, we should hear from the political leadership about what they plan to do to slow the spread of COVID-19 and how, when this is over, they plan to rebuild: What will they do to help the 20 million to 30 million people in hospitality and retail whose jobs have gone, evaporated?

Refusing to wear a mask may have deep cultural significance for some, particularly in the West, but for all of us, restaurants are part of the fabric of our living. For most us, the happiest moments of lives have been in a restaurant, celebrating things that are precious milestones in life, like birthdays, engagements and anniversaries.

We can’t give one cultural totem precedence over another.

More than half the nation’s restaurants may never reopen — employing 10 percent of the nation’s workforce and accounting for 4 percent of GDP — and the biggest helping hand to them would be to throw the Defense Production Act at manufacturing millions of indoor air scrubbers. It would increase livability for all, ending our isolation from each other.

Wash your hands, America. Don’t wring them. We can beat the virus when we fight on the same side with science and respect the commonweal.

Dimly through the fog of the future some structures are emerging. Some of the purely physical are becoming discernible. The changes in work, collective consciousness and play are harder to bring into focus.

We — call us a ravaged generation — will face a future, the future indicative, radically different from that past that we have known.

The obvious is that work is changed, rearranged and at times lost. A lot of real estate will be begging for a mission or will have to face the wrecker’s ball. Shopping centers will see huge change, maybe devastation.

Those big-box stores that anchored shopping centers will be fewer. Some might be converted to gyms or old-fashioned markets with dozens of small stalls. But these uses are limited, and those cinder-block behemoths are many.

Some have suggested that big-box stores can be converted to affordable housing. But architects say it is easier to knock them down and build new homes on their sites. Like the bomb craters that dotted London after World War II, these will be a kind of ruin for some time, a reminder as to how life was.

After the shopping centers, come the office buildings — the very symbol of a modern city, from the grand Empire State Building in New York to the flashy, all-glass Shard skyscraper in London to the wildly imaginative buildings that were built as symbols around the world as much as needed work space. Now they’ll be sentinels of the city of the past.

The short story is fewer people will be going back to work in offices. Telecommuting has rapidly come of age; it is acceptable and even desirable. Many, like myself, won’t like it.

Human contact has been part of work since urbanization began. Indications are that we’re going to be less urbanized, more suburbanized and ruralized.

People who have commuted vast distances into cities — like those who left home at 4 a.m. in Connecticut to be at their desks in Manhattan at 8 a.m. — will sleep in without guilt.

It isn’t just that COVID-19 has forced us to work differently, at home and separated, it’s that digitization has matured enough to make it possible, almost in confluence with the demands of life under the virus. Magically, Zoom has changed just about everything. It’s been not only a liberating force but also a force for change.

But huge change and the innovation that will accompany it will have a price.

One survey found that 53 percent of the nation’s restaurants will never reopen, and a lot of wonderful people will be out of work — for a long time. Restaurateurs are the most entrepreneurial of people, and many will open new venues. But that takes time and capital.

This loss of traditional work, which applies across the hospitality industry, will have deleterious effects elsewhere. For example, the fishing industry can’t sell all its catch. It has always depended on the restaurants for sales.

COVID-19 isn’t alone in reshaping the future. For years digitization and artificial intelligence, which have made telecommuting possible, have been subtracting jobs.

Farming, for example, is undergoing relentless change. Today’s farmer is more a systems manager than the renaissance figure of the past who could help a cow give birth, repair a tractor, taste soil to determine its pH, and handle the harvest with migrant help.

Now tractors and farm equipment are fully digitized and can operate from a laptop on a kitchen table, and the harvest is increasingly automated by sensitive robots with multiple sensors guiding kind claws.

It’s a new world, and we need to be brave and imaginative to master it.

There are worries afoot in the electric utility world.

The issue is the integrity of the grid and the possibility that foreign suppliers of bulk power equipment (BPE) may have introduced the technical equivalent of Manchurian candidates into the hardware that manages the system.

This represents a departure from previous concerns that have emphasized software and paid more attention to attacks aimed at the computer systems of electric utilities than to their hardware. They get millions of these attacks every day and have worked relentlessly to protect against them.

Now a new front has opened.

The battle has moved from the world of internet technology to the hardware itself, to BPE. Leading the charge to draw attention to systems whose vulnerability may have been overlooked is Joe Weiss, a professional engineer, a veteran of the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, and now an independent consultant.

Weiss said in a blog, which went viral in the world of utility engineers last week, “Why would attackers hit defenses head-on when they can simply bypass them?” And that is exactly what they’re doing, he believes.

On May 1, President Trump issued the far-reaching Executive Order 13920, which prohibits the purchase of major BPE from potential adversaries, later named by the Department of Energy as China and Russia, among others.

China is the primary supplier of BPE to American utilities.

Then, on July 8, the department issued a request for information about what the electric utilities purchase and from where. It appears the government is attempting to scope the problem.

Initially, many in the industry thought the executive order was just another shot in the Trump administration’s trade war with China. But not so. It signaled what may be a big vulnerability not only in installed equipment but also equipment that is on order.

China has become the primary supplier of heavy equipment for utilities, particularly big transformers. While these have no moving parts, Weiss believes they can have “backdoors” through which an adversary could catastrophically alter their operation.

The key, he says, may be the sensors that can send false readings and bring about major disruption, and send parts of the grid haywire.

Transformers are critical to the distribution of current. They boost voltage to compensate for line losses and ultimately step down the voltage for local distribution.

This vulnerability story began after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when a trend to look at the security of the electric grid turned to a greater concentration on IT and, some argue, away from the old regime of operational technology, where engineers took responsibility for the security of their equipment.

A cultural division opened, as I was told by the one of the nation’s top computer experts in academia.

Underlying this shift in responsibility are the workhorses of modern industry, programmable controllers, part of the larger Industrial Control Systems. These are the automated systems that do the work of managing operations in modern industry, including utilities.

The worry for the electric utility industry is that these devices that manage the grid could be manipulated without showing up as an attack.

There is precedent for this kind of attack: The Stuxnet virus that disabled centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010. The United States and Israel didn’t go after the facility’s computer system — an attack that would’ve been detected — but rather after the controllers governing the centrifuges.

Last year, something big was discovered, and details are sketchy: A Chinese-made transformer at a large investor-owned utility was found to have counterfeit parts and, perhaps, backdoors through which the integrity of the grid could’ve been compromised.

Alarm bells rang at the departments of Homeland Security and Energy.

A similar or identical transformer made by JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Company Ltd., a family owned company with a small office in San Jose, California, was seized by agents of the DHS and DOE and hustled straight to Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, upon its arrival at the Port of Houston.

This transformer had been destined for the Western Area Power Administration’s Aluit Station, near Denver. WAPA is one of the power distribution systems owned by the government through the Department of Energy.

What, if anything, has been discovered in the transformer hasn’t been disclosed.

Everything is cloaked in secrecy, my sources tell me.

The good news is that if you get COVID-19, you stand a better chance of getting better sooner, without having a long, if any, stay in the ICU, and you may not have to suffer on a ventilator.

The bad news is there may be no silver bullet of a vaccine by the end of the year, and if one is approved, there may be a free-for-all among vaccine developers, countries and special interests.

For the improvement in treatment outlook, thank a process called exaptation. The term has been appropriated from evolutionary biology and means essentially work with what you have, adapt and deploy. The most quoted example is how birds developed wings for warmth and found they could be used for flying.

One of the great exponents of exaptation, Omar Hatamleh, chief innovation officer, engineering, at NASA, says, “There is an abundance of intellectual property that can be repurposed or used in areas and functions outside of their original intended application.”

There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of medicines — generally referred to as “compounds” in the pharmaceutical world — that have been developed for specific purposes but which may be useful in some other disease, “off label” in the pharmacologists’ vernacular. An example of this off-label use is the steroid Dexamethasone. It has been found to reduce death among critically ill COVID-19 patients.

It is a good idea to look outside the box, as we are constantly advised. But it is also a good idea to look inside the box as well.

Inside every hospital, for example, is a radiation department. Radiation is a medical tool universally used in cancer treatments.

Now comes word that radiation can save lives and cut hospital stays for COVID-19 patients. James Conca, a Tri-Cities, Wash.,-based nuclear scientist, explains to me, “This treatment is critical because severe cases cause cytokine release syndrome, also known as a cytokine storm, causing acute respiratory arrest syndrome, which is what kills.”

Dr. Mohammad Khan, associate professor of radiation oncology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, gave patients at the university’s Winship Cancer Institute a single, very low dose of radiation (about one-hundredth of the dose given cancer patients) and they began to show almost immediate improvement. The radiation reduced the inflammation — and in COVID-19, as in other diseases, it is inflammation that kills.

The use of radiation in this way opens the door to the treatment of many diseases where inflammation is the killer.

The Emory experience fits with a burgeoning field of study where sophisticated physical and engineering techniques intersect with medicine.

Dr. James Welsh of Loyola University Medical Center, Chicago, and a consortium of doctors and hospitals are hoping to launch nationwide clinical trials on the use of radiation in combating killer inflammation.

The sad thing, Conca says, is that the benefits of radiation in treating pulmonary disease, especially viral pneumonia, were known 70 years ago. In treating the pneumonia, he said, success rates were 80 percent, but the rise of antibiotics and antiviral drugs, combined with public concern about radiation, led to its being confined to the treatment of cancer.

Generally nuclear medicine tends to mean cancer treatment, but nuclear scientists have chafed at this.

While the outlook for therapies — for things that will save your life — is bright, the outlook for a vaccine, so hoped for, is confused. Assuming that a vaccine is perfected, that it works on most people and across a range of mutations, the stage is set for chaotic distribution.

One man and his company, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, may hold the key to who gets the vaccine first. He has signed pacts with four vaccine hopefuls, including the one from Oxford University, considered by many to be the frontrunner.

Serum Institute is partnering with the British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca to manufacture and supply 1 billion doses of the Oxford vaccine in India and less-developed countries. AstraZeneca says it is working on equitable distribution. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said Britain should have first dibs on British-developed vaccines.

The World Health Organization is the only international organization that might be able to orchestrate distribution, and the United States is withdrawing from that body.

Science may be forging ahead — exaptation at work — but human folly is as virulent a strain as ever.