This collage is from images captured during a short visit to Göteborg over Christmas. Towards the end of this post I’ll explain why I made it.

Well, the awfully strange Christmas 2020 is officially over now. While Covid-19 still lingers in the shadows, morphing into new variants all over the place, an armada of vaccines is certainly closing in. But it seems as if the virus knows this and is shape-shifting – almost playing with us.

From what I’ve understood, the new vaccines represent the next-level in immunology tech.
But what if this breed of virus is even smarter and capable of mutating beyond what all the involved pharmaceuticals can provide protection against? What if this is just the first installment in an endless cat-and-mouse game where, for example, BioNTech’s synthesized mRNA therapeutical vaccine has to constantly be tweaked to cope with new virus versions?

Listen to Kara Swisher’s straight forward interview with the two head scientists at BioNTech here. Or, better yet, read the transcript from the interview here. Kara’s podcast “Sway” is a new NYTimes.com favorite. Not quite up there with Michael Barbaro’s show, The Daily, at least not yet.

In Sweden, we have this old tradition where children open up “hidden” doors in a cardboard Christmas Calendar until it’s either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I forget which.

While driving back to Vejbystrand earlier today in torrential rain and then a snow blizzard, we listened to a few podcasts, including the aforementioned interview with BioNTech. It was while listening to that episode that I came up with the idea for the collage above. Smart scientists have found a door and located a handle to open it with. They’ve even picked the lock. But we don’t know for sure what awaits behind it…

More of my collages here: www.raboff.com/art