I love it when the bad guy/thing in a movie gets what they deserve, none more than in the "Blade" movies with Wesley Snipes. He uses bullets made of silver, hollow-point and filled with garlic, and bombs that emit ultraviolet light, to eliminate vampires and werewolves.
A silver bullet is used to describe a simple, seemingly magical solution to a difficult or long-standing problem. As our world becomes more complex, very few people are comfortable with agnosticism - "I don't know, and I'm cool with that", and they crave simple answers, even to the most complex or chaotic problems where the answers will only become apparent they are tackled.
So they reach for the silver bullet that will provide assurance and seemingly a solution - that conspiracy theory, those "shiny objects" - new technologies - dangled before us by the political and business elites, like renewable energy, electric vehicles, sustainable businesses, reducing agriculture (Netherlands) to reduce carbon emissions, vaccination, etc.
These all ignore an indisputable fact: every single living organism (including earth as a total system) is a complex system, with interconnections that we can only glimpse, e.g., the microbiome in our gastrointestinal tract that more and more is being seen to house microbes that are implicated in many mental and physical disorders, previously not known.
Vaccination and the preoccupation with antibody levels ignore both the important role played by T-cells (CD4+ and CD8+, mainly) and the microbiome, and that we each have a unique response to pathogen invasion - both "natural" and artificial (vaccination). Some individuals are afflicted with multiple sclerosis and glandular fever after infection with the Epstein-Barr virus, others with Guillain-Barré Syndrome after influenza, and then there's chronic fatigue syndrome after virus infections, "Long Covid" most recently.
Politicians and corporations will always push that silver bullet, to make money or to hold on to power. And to demonise rational sceptics who are suspicious of anything touted as a silver bullet for intractable problems, either locally or globally.
