The idea of a mild version that makes us all immune is a wonderful one. Except, we don’t know if the South African data can be extrapolated to an older, less immune population. In addition, prior covid infection does not protect as well as our vaccines do. That is clear. (Now prior infection plus vaccine seems to be great)
I think you are mistaken in saying the vaccine grants better protection than getting the virus itself. Wasn’t there an Israeli study done some months ago that seemed to show the opposite – that natural immunity after infection was more effective than the vaccines? If that is the case, since the vaccines are leaky anyway (they don’t stop the spread), it makes more sense to vaccinate vulnerable demographics while letting the virus run its course through the younger and healthier population. That is the way to achieve herd immunity in my view.
Plus, with a leaky vaccine people, healthy people are more likely to be asymptomatic and expose more people to the virus rather than just staying home because they get the sniffles. It also gives people a false sense of security and encourages riskier behavior (“I don’t have to distance or wash my hands anymore because I got the shot”) and this is made worse by government officials and the media when they try to obfuscate just how effective the vaccines really are in the hopes of getting more people to get vaccinated (the “noble lie”)
Re political control. Why would our leaders do this exactly? What is their gain? With a poorer economy, tax revenues are lower. With a pandemic that turns out bad, the people in power are more likely to look bad than good and get voted out. Do you think every nation n the world has all got together and decided to create panic to keep their citizens under control? That sounds pretty improbable and frankly paranoid to me.
Just because there’s no conspiracy with dimly lit rooms, cigars, and men with cylinder hats, doesn’t mean someone isn’t benefiting from this. Small businesses are failing while tech giants like Amazon are making record profits. Hell, Mark Zuckerberg just announced his “metaverse”. Were it not for the endless lockdowns, few people would have ever seriously imagined a future where you’re going to spend all your time “wired in”, buying NFT land in a virtual world while big corporations own everything in the physical world. There’s no conspiracy but you’re being willfully ignorant if you don’t think there are parties that are using the Covid as an opportunistic way to promote their own longstanding agendas.
And as for politicians, it is easier for them to get their mandate by putting fear into you and making you feel like they are the only ones that can protect you from this invisible enemy. Remember, Hitler’s Germany was in a perpetual state of emergency ever since the burning of the Reichstag.
Fact is, in the uk hospitalizations are way up, deaths from omicron are starting to appear. There is a crisis in London with staff at hospitals, ambulance drivers, firefighters off work at a level that it is compromising the essential service they provide.
Hospitalization and death are much of what we are trying to prevent, (but should also try to prevent sickness, and the impact of that in the economy and peoples mental health) but if we wait till they go up, we will already be two weeks behind as they are a lagging indicator.
Have you
been to a hospital lately? Because I have, and it was completely fucking empty. I know people are going to give me shit for this, but if ICUs are overflowing and people are dying, wouldn’t there be some very obvious visual indicators, like seeing ambulances more frequently, seeing crowding in hospitals, etc? Something just doesn’t jive with the media narrative we’re being fed vs what you actually see when you leave the house.
