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?
