That's not the jist of this post by the brilliant Umair Haque: "It's Been Two Years - And We Still Haven't Learned COVID's Lessons." Haque actually argues that we could be facing mortality rates like that if we don't smarten up. We need to treat this pandemic as the public health catastrophe that it is and mashall the collective resources necessary to defeat it.
The really scary stuff? It’s Covid 19 recombining with SARS or MERS. Why? Because SARS has a mortality rate of 15%. MERS has a mortality rate of 40%.
We got away easy with Covid 19. It has a mortality rate of “just” 2%. That’s incredibly high on average — but it’s low for a Coronavirus outbreak.
Now imagine the chaos and devastation that happens if, God forbid, Covid 19, this Coronavirus, recombines with its cousins, SARS or MERS. Then we don’t have a new “variant” — we have a whole new strain.
What does that strain look like? It has the infectiousness of Omicron — an R of 5, which means one person infects five more, which is incredibly high, and why Omicron has exploded in country after country at lightning speed.
Only this future strain isn’t “mild.” It’s the very opposite. It’s incredibly deadly. It has a mortality rate of between 20 and 40%.
Why? Because it’s picked up the lethality genes from SARS and MERS, and the spike protein genes make Omicron ultra infectious, and recombined them.
And far from being unlikely, Covid-19 recombining with a much, much worse Coronavirus is very likely — because Coronaviruses are adept at recombining their genes, and now there are billions of hosts for Covid. All it would take is one immunocompromised person or maybe even animal getting Covid 19 and SARS or MERS, incubating the new strain — and bang. Say hello to a new plague.
So what is the cost of precaution? How high is it? It’s super, super cheap, in fact. Protecting the world from the plague Covid could — will become — if it goes unchecked is the best bargain in human history. It would take a few billion dollars — between ten and fifty — to vaccinate the planet. That’s not even one Jeff “I like to exploit my workers” Bezos.
But we live in a society where Doug Ford panders to shit-heads like his daughter and her husband so that he and his selfish businessman constituency can play "business-as-usual" and where dreamy Justin Trudeau sides with Big Pharma against vaccinating the world while "progressive" Montreal Simon jerks himself off to all the dreaminess.
In other news, David Sirota says it's hard not to think that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to lose in 2022.
On the one hand, we see congressional Democrats casting themselves as the heroes of a West Wing episode, rightly screaming about all the web of connections between the January 6 rioters, right-wing news outlets, and top Donald Trump administration officials, who appear to have been entertaining plans for an actual coup.
On the other hand, we see Democrats fully leaning into a likely 2022 disaster. They are going far beyond merely refusing to give Americans an affirmative reason to vote for them; in sabotaging their own purported agenda, they seem to be deliberately trying to lose to the very fascists they claim to oppose, going out of their way to insult and harm as many voters as possible before their likely collapse.
Of course they do. It's hard to blame the Republicans for stopping all your initiatives when you control the House, the Senate and the Executive. They know people are seeing through this bullshit. But Biden is such a low-functioning moron that he probably thinks people will really be fooled by his giving the Repugs control of the legislature and then saying Repug control is the solitary reason why he can't do anything for them.
I wonder how Democratic Party hack blogger Driftglass would respond to that essay?
2 comments:
Sirota needs to go on Maddow right now and shatter the illusions of Biden the great. Although dear Rachel will not want to hear what he has to say; it's the best summary I've read in a while and clarity of the disaster that awaits the party in November. Co President Manchin on Fox News killing the agenda is all you need to see and don't fall for the cordial conversation nonsense that dribbled out on Monday.
Tim,
That would be effective. But the danger would be that it would start the process of informing the US-American people about the way their political system really operates. And the whole point of Maddow's existence now (though she might now be too insane to acknowledge it) is to deceive the US-American people about the nature of the system that rules them.
She'd be fired. As would anyone associated with such a dangerous moment in US Bullshit News.
So Sirota's views will never see the time of day.
I suspect you already knew all that.
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