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Omicron is Upon Us
The wheels are falling off again
Immoral Access
I just read something that made my stomach turn.
In the 59 countries the World Bank defines as being high income, nearly 16 booster doses have been administered per 100 people. In low-income nations, the figure is under 11 shots per hundred people. But that’s not boosters for the low-income nations. Instead, it’s the total number of doses administered. We have had more people get a booster, than they’ve had get a first shot.
On top of the quantitative problem around vaccine doses, there’s also an issue of quality.
A growing body of preliminary research suggests the Covid vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious Omicron variant.
All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.
Protecting against serious illness is great, but even asymptomatic cases can lead to long covid. (Nearly 1/3 of the long covid cases in one study were originally asymptomatic ones.) Vaccine inequality has those with the least remaining at the greatest risk and the gulf is widening.
Wealthy nations took most of the vaccine production for the better part of the last year, especially the mRNA vaccines, and then we reached back into the cookie jar when Delta (and now Omicron) arrived on the scene. We’ve now lapped the people who have waited the longest for their first turn.
These circumstances are unconsionable. We need to demand vaccine equity, so that we can start bridging the divide which puts us all at greater risk of additional problematic variants, which could be even worse that what we’re already dealing with.
Update: Israel is now recommending 4th doses for vulnerable groups. Other nations will surely follow. Native without access to the IP will have to wait longer.
Omicron Grabs the Wheel
While South Africa sounded the alarm on Omicron, the UK is taking its first big hit. On the day Boris Johnson removed protections related to covid-19 to please his donors (July 19, 2021), the nation had had a total of 5,480,939 confirmed cases. On December 20, 2021, the case total was up to 11,475,425. The UK has now had more cases since that highly-questionable maneuver than in the first year and a half of the pandemic.
Update: This seems so ridiculous that I keep going back to the source to verify my claim. Here’s a screenshot of the data from Our World in Data (mostly to keep me from checking again).
Most of these cases were pre-Omicron. What happens next with a near vertical curve that’s already a third higher than its previous peak?
Yesterday, after a cabinet meeting, Johnson said, “We will have to reserve the possibility of taking further action to protect the public, and to protect public health and the NHS, and we won’t hesitate to take that action.” When a world leader is threatening to do what they should quite obviously already be doing, you remove them from office.
Over in the US, Omicron is now estimated to account for 3/4 of cases. It was just 1% two weeks ago, and 13% last week. Let’s hope it’s less harmful than Delta, but even if that’s the case, our healthcare profit system is at great risk of a wave of cases that’s significantly worse than anything it’s seen up to this point.
And our government is telling people things like, “Our vaccines work against Omicron, especially for people who get booster shots when they are eligible.” (Emphasis mine.) This tells me they are trying really hard to convince people to get vaccines who haven’t yet, by somewhat overstating the benefits of the initial vaccination course against omicron, while also reminding us that young people are not yet eligible for boosters.
The same press briefing included the following passage.
We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this.
For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.
As many others have pointed out, the message here is clear. Rather than work to mitigate transmission, the administration is turning its back on unvaccinated people. We’re welcoming avoidable tragedy. It’s immoral, and along with the suffering it will cause, it’s an invitation for an electoral reckoning.
And to the point about schools, I have school age kids and I’m a teacher. I believe education is of vital importance. But I do not believe it necessitates exposing our kids to unnecessary risks. We could do all the things that are necessary to make schools safe, but we haven’t committed the funding for that and it can’t happen overnight. Give that, we can go online for a while to mitigate transmission. Educational outcomes would suffer somewhat, but I believe the cases we avoided would be well worth it. We should also do everything possible to support families to make this as painless as we can.
Update: As I was getting ready to publish this post, Andy Slavitt reported that the US will send out 500 million instant tests for free to Americans. (Several people on Twitter are thanking Jen Psaki for her poor handling of a question about testing a few days ago.
Is Bill Gates Pro-Covid?
I’m sick of hearing about Bill Gates in the context of the pandemic. (And in general, for that matter.) My last post covered the meddling — by the man who gave a TED Talk in 2015 on humanity’s lack of readiness for pandemics — that cost the world an open access vaccine. He’s now surveyed the landscape and is impersonating the ‘This is fine’ dog.
Writing this as the Omicron variant was ramping up seems a wishful bit of self-soothing. If he wants to help, he can buy IP access for the 100+ companies that have been found to have the capacity to make mRNA vaccines,.
Closing Bits
On Monday, the US had over a quarter of a million cases for the eleventh time in the pandemic. It was the first time over that mark since September. Let’s hope it was an anomaly. But hope is not a strategy so let’s keep clamoring for change. We have to work to shut down transmission or we’re going to keep riding the COVID rollercoaster.
Germany’s Robert Koch Institute is calling for a hard lockdown.
For some ideas about what we ought to be scrambling to do, check out this video Claudia Sahm just shared. In it, Julia Raifman calls on the Biden admin to do the things they promised to do back in January.
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