Omicron’s Here. We Invited It In | The Tyee:
EXCERPT--Article references Canadian response, but USA is nothing if not worse!:
Four myths we chose to embrace
We find ourselves in this bad place because of the easy currency of bad ideas in a technological society.
These dangerous ideas — and I’m only going to deal with four — are worth reviewing again because if we don’t challenge and abandon them, we will be fighting COVID for years.
Myth 1: Vaccines will get us out of this.
From the beginning of the pandemic politicians told citizens to wait for the vaccine because a single technology will save us.
Yet as The Tyee has consistently warned, vaccines are imperfect tools that have severe limits. Moreover no vaccine has ended any outbreak without the help of other public health tools including masks, quarantines and reductions in mobility. The assumption that a vaccine or drugs can end a novel evolving pathogen in real time without the strategic use of other interventions to bring transmission to zero has made society more fragile and not less so.
Omicron’s superspreading events in vaccinated populations have highlighted the danger of this thinking. Three doses of the Pfizer vaccine offers only 70-per-cent protection.
Yes, the vaccines may blessedly keep some of us out of the hospital and that’s good news. But if vaccines aren’t smartly paired with other interventions to end transmission, we will be spinning our wheels for years to come.
A vaccine-only policy will prolong the pandemic and exhaust our health-care systems. Only nuanced policies that focus on eliminating transmission with the strategic use of testing, improved ventilation and restraints on international travel will get the job done.
Myth 2: Pandemics are unpredictable and have nothing to do with policy or human behaviour.
Not true. Our global technosphere has provided a perfect environment for COVID to flourish. Two human behaviours in a technological society have fed and accelerated this pandemic. The first is unrestricted global travel, which guarantees the circulation of variants. The second is poor ventilation in our artificial living and working spaces.
International travel seeded the pandemic and has launched every variant since. Poor ventilation, in turn, has guaranteed the rapid transmission of new variants in schools, workplaces, restaurants and spin classes. Without enclosed spaces built by our technologies, this virus would perish. The evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein have correctly called COVID “a disease of buildings, cars, ships, trains and airplanes.”
Yet public policy has failed to address these two critical issues. The complexity expert Joe Norman correctly has imperfect tools that “Adaptively severing long-range connections — essentially all long-range connections — should be the first step in addressing any emerging disease that poses significant pandemic potential.”
And until Canada’s politicians become strong advocates for changes in clean air standards in public buildings and workplaces, the pandemic will linger like secondhand smoke.
Myth 3: We can live with this virus, and it will become milder over time.
Really? How’s that working for you? Economies flooded by fear don’t work very well when people are dying, the hospitals are full and routine medical care becomes difficult if not impossible.
In contrast the research shows that societies that collectively respond with policies that reduced transmission to zero or near zero experienced fuller civil rights and healthier economies.
Elimination matters for several key reasons. For starters there is no guarantee any new virus will evolve toward a milder state. It is a complete scientific myth.
Let me repeat Haseltine’s pointed warning that we have not seen the worse COVID can deliver yet.
At the same time the cost of “living with the virus” is growing exponentially. The variants keep adding to those political, economic and psychological costs by increasing transmission, severity and lethality of COVID-19.
More variants equals more mutations which equals more risk for all of us. And the variants are now clearly outracing the vaccines. How long do Canadians want to be prisoners to this charade because politicians believe “we can live with this virus”?
Myth 4: COVID is just a flu-like virus.
Just because a novel coronavirus may provoke flu-like symptoms doesn’t make it a flu. Or even a close relative. Unlike the flu, which is spread by children, COVID-19 is driven by random superspreader events originating in just 20 per cent of the population. The two viruses represent radically different diseases requiring totally different public health responses.
As many physicians have argued, it is best to think of this novel virus as an evolving thrombotic fever.
It attacks the vascular system and can destroy brain cells.
It inflames the heart and can destabilize immune systems.
It can even lower sperm counts and motility.
Even people with mild symptoms can suffer from chronic disabilities (fatigue and brain fog) a year after infection. To date we have no clear idea how an infection might undo a person’s health a decade from now.
Any politician who still dismisses or compares COVID to a flu should be forced to clean and bathe the dead.
Like many competent public health workers the developmental biologist Malgorzata Gasperowicz has long argued that “waves don’t come on their own. Bad policies make waves.”
And that’s Omicron in a viral nutshell. It’s the result of only focusing on vaccines and ignoring other vital interventions such as widespread testing and border controls to stop transmission.
It’s the consequence of ignoring the science on aerosol spread because Omicron now thrives in unventilated spaces.
It’s also the direct result of not addressing the problems posed by unrestricted global mobility.
Gasperowicz has another important point. The virus just doesn’t attack individuals but society as a whole. If we think of society as a meta-organism and each person as a cell in that organism, then we can think of public health and political leadership as our immune system.
“Societies with weak or compromised immune/defence systems end up with raging infection or sepsis. Societies with strong/functional immune systems clear up the infection. They don’t get infected or don’t let the infection to progress,” Gasperowicz told The Tyee.
From the beginning, COVID has asked Canadian society the rudest of questions: Is your political immune system working for you? Or for a triumphal global virus?
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