Hello Sonya! Thank you for sharing your exciting conversations about the future of learning. I’ve been thinking a lot about the immediate future with regards to our nation’s vaccine rollout process over the next few months, and I wrote a Community Voices piece for the Bakersfield Californian where I shared some of my thoughts on how to get the vaccine to more Americans.

A lot of people are concerned by the potential side effects of the vaccine, so I decided to venture a little bit into your area of expertise and use chaos theory to explain it. Hopefully I do not kill the theory through my analogy, which may provide a parallel to understanding immune-mediated side effects.

A simplified version of chaos theory is the Butterfly Effect – the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings here in Bakersfield could create a hurricane in Australia. There is an emphasis on the sensitivity of the initial events that generates a non-linear and astronomically large response through interconnected feedback loops. The immune system in our bodies is a huge and complex organism. When it becomes tweaked by a virus, vaccine or other phenomena, we do artificially create a butterfly effect.

In some, that effect could take a fatal turn. But in my opinion, nations will accept these side effects as a better bargain than the virus, and COVID vaccines are here to stay. Which takes us into another theory, which is the theory of the greater good…

I enjoy having this fruitful conversations with you, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

-Brij