this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Dang it.
At least the new vaccine is supposed to protect against the newest variant. Not looking forward to another shot, though.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/what-to-know-about-the-eg5-variant
The ongoing problem with new variants is that vaccine research has to forecast which mutations are going to be dominant by the time that the research has been undertaken. The boosters from a year ago were focused on BA5, but the latest EG5 variant quickly becoming dominant is from the XBB path.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-summary
In a way, people are right. It's just the flu now. Not in symptoms or severity, but in the way that we'll just have to keep doing regular vaccinations.
Just think, if we had shut down for 2~weeks at the beginning and enforced vaccination at gunpoint, we wouldn't be in this mess.
This is why we are completely screwed if a bird flu or other highly transmissible but more deadly than Covid virus starts spreading. There are people who not only will not follow basic health and safety guidelines, they will actively fight, and sabotage other's attempts at following the guidelines.
The other part of the equation is that if the wealthier countries had not only shut down but quickly provided vaccines for poorer more densely populated countries, the spread would also have been lessened.
Oh, you mean working together for the betterment of humanity as a whole? Fat chance.
Nope, there was never a chance for us to eliminate it. By the time we even knew it existed Covid had been spreading worldwide for over 2 months (initial spread Oct-Nov 2019, discovered late Dec 2019), so there were a lot of unreported cases everywhere.
And once it's in a household it takes way longer than 2 weeks to eliminate due to delayed spread between household members. Also some people stay contagious for months.
And I'm all for the vaccines, but they also don't stop covid, they make it harder to get and reduce symptoms, but you can still get it and spread it even with the vaccine.
The two weeks and it's gone was a fantasy to sell people on lockdowns to slow down covid, it was never going to eliminate it.
They would have worked if we took them seriously.
"They never would have worked" is a lie told by people unwilling to shoot violators.
We could have ended it through a (relative to the length of the still ongoing pandemic) short period of massive testing and quarantine, like what Vietnam did.
Instead white people had to be waited on by wage employees so their could feel important and now millions of people are permanently disabled.
Also all the deaths.
Nope, covid was way too widespread, and exists in multiple animal species, meaning it can easily jump back to humans even if we got rid of it in our populations (which would never have happened).
In all of human history we've eliminated a single disease, Smallpox, and it doesn't spread through the air. Yet you think a few weeks lockdown would have actually gotten rid of a far more transmissible airborne illness? Get real.
We could have done it.
We have more than enough bullets.
For every human, and every wild animal on the planet, sure. Not exactly worth it.
Wouldn't have taken that many.
Especially if vaccine patents were not only shared, the vaccines were administered at the barrel of a gun.
We could have certainly fared better than the real world plan of "let's infect everyone on purpose as quickly as possible".
I find it hilarious (at least you'll laugh until you cry, and/or die) how for some, consent simply does not matter whatsoever.
Have many of the symptoms? Wonder if it's COVID? Enough to go get tested for it at least? And THEN go to visit your 90-year-old granny's house, not bothering to tell her that? Knowing full well that she was just recovering from various sicknesses herself and so has a weak immune system? Edit: oh, and let's say just after the vaccine was invented but before many people were able to get it yet.
In that case, then you ~~MIGHT be~~ ARE a Republican. It is shocking to me how the death tolls were not much larger than they were... except they WERE, and we will never know by how much be of all the misrepresention of the deaths as "old age" or "diabetes", bc obviously it simply could NOT have been COVID (except... remind me again why not?).
Whether you choose to think it's "merely the flu" or not, why doesn't the recipient's concerns matter AT ALL!?
See, I told you it was "funny" - don't you see how "hilarious" it all is? ~~not at all akin to murder in any way, nope, not at all~~
The UK doesn't even do that anymore, unless you're over 65. Otherwise you can't get vaccinated.
Well you don't get long COVID from the flu so it's not like the flu at all.