Recall how President Trump was mocked, ridiculed, lampooned, and otherwise derided in April of last year for his conjecture that sunlight might possibly kill the coronavirus. Well, it appears he may again be vindicated. A team at U.C. Santa Barbara, including researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Manchester, and ETH Zurich, just released a study that says sunlight can "inactivate" the SARS-CoV-2 virus as much as eight times faster than previously assumed in theoretical modeling.
Intuition is routinely ignored or lowercased in our Western societies founded, as they are, on Platonic ideals and the pursuit of wisdom and truth. Our hyper-rationalism doesn't leave much room for the seeming vagaries of something not fully rooted in reason. But the word "intuition" itself either derives from a Latin word meaning "consider" or an old English word meaning "contemplate." If those words sound counter-intuitive to our modern-day understanding of intuition – trust your gut.
Intuition: A Survival Tool
In fact, intuition is something many scientists, anthropologists, and other sundry learned persons all agree has been essential to our species' continuity. Survival instinct - often referred to as the sixth sense – is rooted not in the rational but in the elevation of unconscious knowledge or intuition. Our ancient ancestors didn't always have the benefit of being able to think-tank solutions to a potential danger or a prevailing threat. They had to rely on their gut instincts. Enough of those were historically correct to have enabled us to count human beings in the many billions, here in 2021 A.D. Intuition then, is a powerful element of what it means to be human and survive – sneered at though it may often be.
One deeply intuitive individual who has relied on his gut more often than the acolytes of conventional wisdom have appreciated is former President Donald Trump.
Trump operated from his gut – often to his allies' consternation and the delight of his enemies. But, as the sages say, trust your intuition as it usually turns out to be correct. Trump is living proof of that maxim.
Right, Right, and Right Again
The former president was right about his much-criticized tweet that he had been "wiretapped" by Obama. Of course, Obama himself did not literally plant a wiretap in proximity to the future commander in chief. But it turned out to be true that Trump's campaign and his associates were surveilled in the months leading up to his stunning upset in the 2016 election by Obama's egregiously politicized FBI. His gut checked out.
Likewise, Trump tweeted about the violence committed by migrants in Sweden – something the media lambasted him for and for which the Swedish prime minister scolded him – and he turned out to be correct. There were, in fact, many crimes committed by migrants in Sweden being covered up by the authorities, something to which Prime Minister Stefan Lofven later admitted.
Trump also trusted his gut on imposing a travel ban on China early in the pandemic, for which he was excoriated as racist by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Fourth Estate. That all too obviously turned out to be sound judgment. Trump also tried to encourage states to send children back to school as early as May of 2020, having correctly intuited early on that children were at little risk of a virus with a 99.74% recovery rate. Almost a year later, with infections again on the rise and mortality at the same rates as last May, nearly every single state has suddenly decided it's OK to send children back to school.
And Trump instinctively advocated for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) early in the pandemic as a possible “game changer,” which turned out to be absolutely correct even though the protocol was never adopted in America because of the hyena-like attacks of the partisan media and the performative pronouncements of Anthony Fauci and the WHO. The fact that widespread early use of HCQ in countries worldwide resulted in between 69% and 77% fewer infections in those nations bears out Trump's gut instinct about the inexpensive, highly efficacious malarial drug.
So, back to COVID and sunlight: researchers affirmed the results of an earlier study which demonstrated that short wave ultraviolet (U.V.) light plays a highly effective role in neutralizing active viral particles, including those of SARS-CoV-2. But this portion of the U.V. spectrum is deflected away by the Earth's ozone layer. As often happens with science, the theoretical predictions were defied by the results of the experiments conducted. The virus in the simulated saliva used for this recent study was reduced by sunlight instead of the short wave ultraviolet, eight times faster than the theories suggested: the great majority of coronavirus particles were rendered inactive in under 30 minutes when exposed to sunlight.
These new findings suggest UVA emitting light attached to air filtration systems could be an inexpensive and highly effective means of reducing viral particles' spread.
Sunlight is proving to be helpful in myriad ways against the virus. Science has shown that as much as 90% of COVID-19 sufferers were vitamin D deficient, strongly suggesting that a daily regimen of vitamin D - either through supplement or sunlight - is a highly effective prophylaxis against SARS-CoV-2. And now, this new study demonstrates that sunlight can inactivate the virus with 30 minutes of exposure by interacting with our saliva.
Translation: for your health, get out in the sun, folks - and take your mask off when you do. And if you can't, some doctors recommend a daily dose of a vitamin D supplement to fend off SARS-CoV-2 before it even has a chance of infecting you.
Translation Part 2: Trump was right. Again.
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