From the Editor: Festival board makes tough call, gets credit for acting in the public interest

The Spirit of Morgan City.
The phrase from the bow of the shrimp boat in the Brashear Avenue median came to mind Monday night after the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival Board of Directors voted to cancel this year’s festival.
There’s a feeling that we’re missing more than a weekend of decorated boats, live music and carnival rides
“It’s about family and friends,” said Cajun Coast Director Carrie Stansbury, who gave the board credit for making a tough call. “It’s about spending time together. It’s about Louisiana culture.”
At the same time, we’ve seen too many of our neighbors taken away COVID-19. Twenty of them have died since Aug. 1, according to St. Mary Coroner Dr. Eric Melancon, including two on the day the festival board voted.
How would you like a choice like the one that faced the board? It’s like deciding whether to be Typhoid Mary or the Grinch Who Stole Labor Day.
Dr. William Cefalu Jr. has a worthwhile perspective to share. Cefalu returned to Morgan City after medical school to practice medicine in his hometown.
For the last 18 months, that practice has included the treatment of COVID patients.
“We all would like to have a festival,” Cefalu said Tuesday. “But given the environment and the pandemic, the rational and proper decision is to cancel it.
“Otherwise it would be a super spreader event that would tax a medical infrastructure that can’t take it.”
Melancon and Cefalu have talked about their frustration with St. Mary’s low COVID vaccination rate, which took a 1-point jump in the last week but still is below 32%, lagging even the Louisiana rate. And Louisiana ranks near the bottom when it comes to vaccination.
The two local physicians are encouraging vaccinations for the reasons you know about: self-protection and to slow COVID’s spread.
Melancon also talked Monday night about a reason you may not know about.
It’s in the genes
That reason is that by getting the vaccine and limiting new infections, we reduce the risk that a new variant will emerge, maybe a new variant even more potent than Delta. It has to do with the nature of viruses.
I got a crash course in virus genetics while covering an attempted murder trial in the 1990s. A physician was accused of drawing blood from HIV and hepatitis C patients and injecting it into his extramarital girlfriend. He told the woman he was giving her a shot of B-12, and she later tested positive for both diseases.
Prosecutors would like to have used DNA testing to demonstrate a definitive link between the viruses from the two patients and the virus infecting the girlfriend. But, as it turns out, you can’t do that with viruses.
Your DNA will be about the same throughout your life, barring some radiological or chemical catastrophe. As your genetic material replicates itself, a built-in editing function throws out the bad copies. One slips through occasionally, creating a mutation. But only a tiny fraction of mutations make any real difference.
Viruses lack that editing function. So they’re prone to what scientists call “genetic drift.” The mistakes get through, changing the genetic blueprint the virus uses to reproduce itself and creating vastly more chances for mutation.
Again, most mutations don’t make any difference. But sometimes a Delta will emerge. A one-in-a-billion shot becomes inevitable with a billion rolls of the genetic dice.
(The doctor, by the way, was convicted and sentenced to 50 years, but not solely because of the DNA evidence. The prosecution was allowed to say only that the viral samples were closely related. Viruses change too rapidly to allow more certainty.)
So you’re not just protecting yourself when you get the vaccine, and you’re not just protecting others against the COVID strains we know. By reducing the number of infections, we’re reducing the chance that a new and dangerous variant will emerge, maybe a variant that defeats our vaccines.
And maybe we won’t have to worry about COVID-19 again when it’s time for the 2022 Shrimp and Petroleum Festival.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.