No COVID Panic Porn Necessary
Something interesting hit my inbox this morning. I’ve been writing since last year about my disdain for all of the COVID-19 panic porn being spread by those who are clinging to the tyrannical power that this infernal pandemic has given them. Back in February, my Morning Briefing warned that the new frontier would be getting everyone to freak out about the COVID variants. This was timed to coincide with the imminent expansion of the vaccine roll out. The petty tyrants who had been telling us to believe in science didn’t want us to feel too safe even if we did just that and got vaccinated.
Those of us who don’t worship in the Church of Fauci have been shrugging off the dire warnings about the variants. Once again, heretical skepticism is being proven right.
This is from the Biotechnology section of the MIT Technology Review:
On May 10, the World Health Organization added a new virus to its list of covid-19 variants of global concern. The variant, B.1.617, is being blamed for the runaway infections in India. It is the fourth addition to a list that also includes variants first identified in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil. “There is some available information to suggest increased transmissibility,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on covid-19, at a briefing.
With each new variant comes growing unease. News stories about “double mutants” and “dangerous variants” stoke fears that these viruses will be able to evade the immune response and render our best vaccines ineffective, sending us back into lockdown. But for the moment “the virus hasn’t fundamentally changed,” says Kartik Chandran, a virologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
So the things we’re doing to combat the original strain still apply.
Why is that so difficult for the CDC or the Harris-Biden-Fauci administration to say?
Oh yeah, the tyranny.
The article is titled “Five reasons why you don’t need to panic about coronavirus variants,” and it’s written from the perspective of the COVID vaccines’ ability to combat the variants. Yes, I know that there are a lot of people who don’t want to get vaccinated. This isn’t a push for that. People can do what they want. I’m vaccinated because I wanted to spend time with my 82-year-old mother and she was more comfortable that way. You can’t really fault me for wanting to make my mother happy.
Here is an abridged version of the 5 reason from the Review‘s newsletter:
Vaccines still offer decent protection.
Even when vaccinated people do get infected, the shots overwhelmingly keep them alive and out of hospital.
Antibodies are only part of the picture. There’s good reason to believe that our body’s T-cell response should provide ample protection against most of the SARS-CoV-2 variants.
If the effectiveness of vaccines begins to wane, we can make booster shots. Moderna has already started testing one which has produced promising initial results.
The fact we keep seeing the same sorts of mutations popping up across the different variants is positive. It’s a phenomenon known as convergent evolution, and it indicates the virus may be running out of new ways to adapt to the current environment.
I found the last one to be particularly interesting. It would appear that the mutation process may already be losing its legs, so to speak. That’s no doubt bad news to Fauci and those who thought they might get a few years out of the variants scare.
The author cautions against complacency, which is the adult approach, of course. That is a much more rational way of dealing with something like this. What we have seen from Fauci and the CDC since the onset of the pandemic can best be described as a random Chicken Little strategy.
Sorry, Fauci cultists, your sky still isn’t falling.
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