“Omicron offers plausible hope for stabilization and normalization.”
Which revives the debates:
Would the people of the world have been better off letting COVID with all of its variants burn through? Exhibit A, India with Delta. It sure would have been more quickly over had we let it run its course! If there was a scientist sitting next to me as I type this he would force me down and take a shit on my head. WE DON'T KNOW HOW LONG O-CONFERRED NATURAL IMMUNITY LASTS OR IF IT PROTECTS AGAINST THE NEXT VARIANT! I understand that. Would you concede that vaccine protection had a half-life and that we needed to get boosters and that O is better than previous variants at evading the vaccines? Somehow, in their scientific way, they would not concede that. All of our mitigation efforts, aside from the vaccines, had the following effect: a-t-t-e-n-u-a-t-i-o-n of the virus. Of course masks and social distancing didn't cure anybody of COVID, didn't make anybody immune to getting COVID--we were told they didn't protect the wearer/distant socializer so much as they protected others from getting the virus from those of us practicing mitigation. What they did was slow the spread of the virus, not stop it, slow it. Cue old joke of cop beating guy: "Now do you want me to stop or just slow down." Would you concede, scientists, that TIME has never been on humanity's side with this thing? (Somehow they wouldn't)
Here's another question for you, scientists: Do our vaccines actually confer immunity against COVID? And scientists, for once in your fucking discourses on this I want you to use the terms "vaccine" and "immunity" as non white-coated, i.e. normal, people do. Here is the template: "Vaccine" means polio vaccine; vaccines "work," i.e. they 99.44% prevent infection, consequences, transmission, repeat rise.(Normal people have this misconception that vaccines work because you're injected with a teeny-tiny bit of a drastically weakened virus so that our immune systems recognize it as an invader and are still able to kill it. In fact, live virus shots are extremely dangerous. Only the earliest first-generation polio vaccines used live virus, and we did not receive any live virus COVID vaccines.) "Immunity" means one shot when you're six years old and you're good to go for life. Got it? Now, with that guidance on approved usage do the COVID vaccines confer immunity? NO. The vaccines didn't teach our cells advanced self-defense techniques. What our vaccines do is prevent the COVID cell's spikes from latching onto, penetrating, and infecting our cells. The vaccines do this by--DO NOT SHIT ON MY HEAD AGAIN, I am talking CONCEPTUALLY here now!--tefloning our cells so that the spikes don't attach. And what happened to your teflon-coated pots and pans at home? The teflon wore off eventually. Hence the need for booster shots. (My recollection however is that teflon kept the eggs from sticking to our frying pan a lot longer than six fucking months!).
Ask the question from a different perspective: If the coronavirus vaccines immunized, in the common understanding, the vaccinated how could the vaccinated spread it--even to other vaxed? Because one, the virus mutates so quickly and drastically, but two, and at the bedrock level, vaccines don't kill the coronavirus.
If I told you that right now you have the polio virus swimming around in your gut, you'd call me a liar and take a shit on my head wouldn't ya? Look it up Pilgrim, you do. I got immunized against polio when I was six, my immunity never waned, I haven't ever been on crutches or in an iron lung. Why is COVID different? They're both viruses, aren't they? Yes, they are. COVID is different because the mechanism of transmission is different from polio. Do you know how you get paralytic polio? I hope you're not eating because polio requires direct fecal-oral transmission. Eww. Besides somebody shitting in your mouth how would that ever happen? Kids. Swimming pools. Swimming holes. Kids shit in the river, you come swimming merrily along, gulp, if that shitty kid had polio, you do now. (Almost.) That's how FDR got it. Almost because the polio virus has to get into your BLOOD, like AIDS. It was HARD to get polio or AIDS. Scientists to this day, sixty-six years after the polio vaccine, do not *quite* understand how the polio virus makes that jump in bodily fluids.
Compare with COVID, how do you get COVID? Ka-CHOO! Pork chop, pork chop, greasy, greasy, you can get COVID easy, easy. I've been vaxed dos and boosted. I still may have it; You, and you and you and you still may have it, it's there live and in person in our bodies, just in our noses not our lungs. Masking and social distancing are superb in preventing infection. The vaccines are superb against hospitalization and death but they don't 99.44% prevent infection or hospitalization or death. Immunity to normal people means "I can't get it, nah-nah boo-boo, stick your head in my doo-doo." The COVID vaccines don't confer immunity in that common understanding. Omicron for the vaxed is a little like being vaxed with live virus COVID-Lite. How many times have you read exasperated scientists ask rhetorically "What do you people want? Immunity from infection or protection against death?" The first time I read an exasperated scientist ask that I would have shit on her head if she were sitting next to me. WE WANT BOTH, MO-RON! "Well, too bad, so sad, you can't have 99.44% of either."
So how good were we, scientists that is? Did we beat nature? How much death did the vaccines prevent? Several hundred thousand? Yeah but. 5.6M worldwide have been killed by COVID. In the U.S., a quarter million lives saved? Yeah but almost 1M Americans have died. “We know that increased vaccination and infection are strengthening our defenses against Covid. I’m more optimistic about our ability to tame the pandemic than at any point since its emergence. Unless, of course, a worse variant emerges, with the infectivity of Omicron and as deadly as Delta.”-Thomas Frieden, a former head of CDC. Oh yeah that, the Doomsday Variant. Omicron is preventing multiples of the deaths that the vaccines have but will its protection wane? Will it be effective against a nee Doomsday Variant? For the people who received the vaccines they were near-true miracle drugs. For the unvaxed, which is the vast majority of the world's population, they did little.
For that vast majority, thank you Omicron. For now.
