It seems that in recent days, the West has become collectively bent on the end of its own civilization. Despite a virus raging across the world which produces dozens of new variants every month, the sheltered media elite have these past few days been repeating the same lies they’ve been saying for nearly two years.
There are daily contradictory claims that COVID is almost over, yet Austria insists that it has no choice but to institute vaccine mandates. There are admissions that vaccines are incapable of adequately preventing infection and spread, but Biden insists that private sector vaccine mandates are necessary in the interest of protecting public health. There are claims that Omicron is not dangerous and is mild, and yet that the US must continue stockpiling Pfizer vaccines and antivirals using public money, despite the fact that we also subsidized their original development. There are claims that transmission is not worrisome, so mask mandates and quarantines will be lifted across most of the US and Spain, but yet that vaccine passports must be put in place to maintain public order in France and Germany.
Even the WHO is on record as saying that “blanket booster programmes are likely to prolong the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate.”
It seems like the media will literally say or do anything, as long as the conclusion is that the state must increase their purchases from Pfizer, and then use the police and judicial machinery to forcibly inject their citizens with them.
So-called journalists from the Economist to Bloomberg have shown how startlingly little they understand about the virus or basic science for that matter, and still take their cues from the press releases of Pfizer rather than sifting through the scientific data themselves, because they are numerically illiterate. The misleading propaganda designed to prop up the economy, and highlights exactly why people are increasingly turning to facebook for news, that the mainstream media will unabashedly lie when it suits their purposes.
To be clear, there is some weak, unsubstantiated evidence that the vaccines can marginally decrease your risk of hospitalization with the original omicron strain, which itself is already being replaced by newer omicron subvariants.
Bombastic claims otherwise are fabrications, more reminiscent of product testimonials than news. In reality, even the omicron variant, itself increasingly outcompeted in the wild, is too new to have been studied in a single peer-reviewed journal article, and the societal evidence is clear, vaccines can not fully prevent infection. Simply look at the UK or Israel. Both have vaccination rates in the mid-70 percents, and both have experienced massive Omicron outbreaks with infections in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions each.
Further, contrary to the refrain from the Washington Post that the unvaccinated are disproportionately burdening the healthcare system, data from the same UK studies which they cite as evidence for the efficacy of the vaccines shows that more than 66% of those hospitalized with Omicron have had either two or three vaccines, a fact that conveniently goes unmentioned. This finding was repeated in the American studies as well, showing that more than two thirds of omicron hospitalizations are occurring in the vaccinated, similar to their numbers in the overall population, demonstrating virtually no protective effect.
To date, all of the the data out their is crude, observational, based on self-reported, and voluntary response data, utterly lacks rigor or peer review. It is in essence, empirical trash, and such research design does even come close to approaching the standard of evidence required by the FDA or any other major regulatory agency for proof of efficacy. Thus, humanity should have found itself incapable of making such crucial life-and-death decisions on the basis of these pieces. Yet thanks to the pro-Pfizer media industrial complex, we repeat unfounded dribble as fact.
When the Economist makes statements suggesting that the best way for China to deal with Omicron is to “open up” and start importing mRNA vaccines, despite the fact that the healthcare systems in the the US and UK have been brought to the verge of collapse because of their shocking institutional inadequacy, anarchic lack of regulations, and frankly ineffective vaccines, but China and Taiwan have been left unscathed and people live in comparative normalcy without the mass deaths or bimonthly shutdowns, audiences can not help but feel cognitive dissonance.
Omicron, despite both the limited anecdotal data and the more than 1000 deaths per day in the US and much higher in the EU, may in fact be milder than Delta. At this point though, we simply can not be sure, though the West has chosen not to air on the side of caution.
But to assume that this will be the last strain, or that future ones will be milder, is pure speculative folly.
Such opinions masqueraded as expertise has been uttered in the interest of preserving elite privileges such as open borders and a humming low-wage service industry. With the infectivity of Omicron, and the repeated suggestions by nihilists everywhere that global infection is inevitable, the production of new strains will inevitably multiply.
Contrary to the suggestions of some naive scientists who have claimed that future strains will be milder through self-selection (did they forget Delta?), there is essentially a 50/50 shot that the next variant to take over the world will instead be more lethal, and that through the other basic rule of self selection, that it will be capable of evading existing immunity. Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that the two-year old vaccines become less effective with each new variant, and seem to require an infinite supply of new boosters, so long as it boosts Pfizers profit margins.
The world wants to be rid of COVID, and typical to consumerist decadent culture, wanted a magic bullet, manifested through effective vaccines. The West then effectively squandered the opportunity to achieve quick global herd immunity by ensuring that almost all of the vaccines developed with government money, rather than being openly-licensed for the public interest, had their technologies reserved for for-profit companies. These monoliths then artificially limited supply by refusing to share development processes. This was then exacerbated by Western governments hoarding hundreds of millions of doses during the summer in the scramble to marginally increase their vaccination rates, at the expense of the 5 billion other people in the world. Inevitably, these delays meant that new strains emerged, rendering the existing vaccines increasingly obsolete and ineffective. This leaves the world in 2022 back to square one, with a false sense of security, imagined immunity, waiting for the next strain.
If the world actually does want to conquer COVID, instead of having it replace cancer and heart disease as the leading cause of death for the elderly and frail for the indefinite future, it would do best to drop the fantasy regarding the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines, at the expense of any real effort to contain the virus.
Efforts to rely on vaccines as the only means of controlling COVID are tacitly admitting that the economic status quo is more valuable than lives of the sickest and most valuable amongst us, and that to keep clubs open and airlines running at full capacity, the weak must die to preserve our convenience.
Otherwise, borders must be closed with enforceable quarantine rules, contact tracing must be reintroduced, and mask mandates must be legally enforced for all indoor venues. Barring these steps, it is likely that the next generation will still be dealing with this disease that this generation of tired elites was too busy to actually tackle.
It is also likely that with the social, economic, and technological costs of continuously battling this virus for the next decades, that countries who have the national self-determination to beat it instead of wallowing in self-pity and capitulating may overtake the decaying West, which has lost not only its societal solidarity, but its collective will to preserve itself. This virus may turn into the crux that China finally needs to displace the US, as only one of these superpowers appears to have any fight left.
Staff writer: Ari B
References:
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7104e3-H.pdf
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1045619/Technical-Briefing-31-Dec-2021-Omicron_severity_update.pdf
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788485
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-next-big-covid-19-variant-could-be-a-triple-whammy-nightmare
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-01-23/niall-ferguson-china-s-covid-victory-over-america-is-pyrrhic
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/imf-warns-china-over-cost-of-covid-lockdowns/ar-AAT130r