LADY KARMA IS A BITCH

Omicron - someone at a place I visited today said it’s a strange-sounding name, like if it was used as the title of a science fiction movie you would either think it very cool or very stupid.

I’ll posit that it’s going to be very cruel to some very stupid people.

Us.

Us as in The First World, the rich part of the planet 20 percent of the total planetary population with 80 percent of the planetary wealth.

Us as in the people whose government is the only one that has the capacity to solve this problem, but it won’t because half the motherfucking morons that constitute the citizenry of the World’s Most Especially Place don’t believe that 2+2=4, and even if they did, they’re too fucking involved with themselves to have the spirit of the grandparents-we-don’t-fucking-deserve to decide to Do It and save the world. And besides, they can “own the libs” this way. We’re the unworthy descendants, raised in too much wealth (no matter how poor you think you are, 80 percent of the people on this planet would love to be you, to live that high on the old hog) and thus a country of spoiled brats who wouldn’t know real deprivation it it came up and kicked us so hard between the legs that we landed in next week.

Omicron, the new coronavirus variant with worrying mutations that sent my wife’s Disney stock we live on to its biggest one-day drop in value this past Friday. (See, I told you, even people who don’t think they live that well can complain that the unknowableness of the new variant has financially harmed us. Yes, we are First Worlders.) The variant with the strange/scary/funny name was first detected where?

It was first detected in LARGELY UNVACCINATED southern Africa. We bitch and moan that we’re only at the point of some 60 percent of the population being fully vaccinated. AFRICA HAS A VACCINATION RATE OF SIX FUCKING PERCENT!!!! And it’s not because the continent is overpopulated with dentally-challenged, mentally-defective inbred morons who believe paid liars on the Electric TeeVee. THEY CAN’T FUCKING BUY IT!! They’re too poor. And now Omicron has arrived in the vaccine dose-rich West. Bringing a global panic and fresh travel bans that are likely the equivalent of locking the barn after the horse is gone. Confirmed cases have popped up from Britain to Australia. It’s probably in your town as you read this.

If omicron does now rip through the nations of the West as badly or worse than the delta variant before it, wealthy nations, we will be reaping what we sowed.

Here is the moment of proof that the largly-ignored statement “No one is safe until we are all safe” is in fact true. New coronavirus variants are the side effect of vaccine inequality, of a global system in which the wealthy nations, and the large developing ones, can corrall all the vaccine doses t hey need for themselves, while the 80 percent of us unfortunate enough to have been born in poorer and less powerful countries subsist on vaccine crumbs.

But we’re paying for that. Low vaccination rates in countries with high populations, and thus great transmissibility vectors, makes those nations breeding grounds for viral mutations that then quickly spread in a globalized world.

African leaders have made strong statements against the flurry of economy-crimping travel bans imposed by Europe and the United States, arguing they had no basis in science and were unjustly punishing nations with low access to vaccines. Given just the history we know of the past 22 months, the travel bans being imposed now are likely already too late. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a televised address. “The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to, and recover from, the pandemic.”

Full vaccination rates in the United States, France and China stand at 60 percent, 70 percent and 77 percent, respectively. Compare that to only SIX PERCENT for Africa’s 1.2 billion people.

J. Stephen Morrison, director of the global health policy center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said over the weekend: “Our achievements in our own country are at high risk because of the failures outside of our country, because of vaccine nationalism, not just in the United States and Europe, but also India and China. If you have uncontrolled transmission in large populations, that is the optimum environment for generating new variants. In Africa, you have a 6 percent vaccination rate. You’re going to get mutations. The prohibition of travel is not informed by science, nor will it be effective in preventing the spread of this variant.”

All we know about Omicron right now is that it appears to spread with relative ease, though it’s too early to tell how virulent it may be. Over the weekend,

This is a new global threat that could have been avoided if we actually lived up to our species name, Homo Sapiens - thinking man. We’re supposed to be the critter on the planet that can foresee the results of an action and take preventive steps to lower the harm of a bad event. Hah! As if we ever have!!

“Despite the repeated warnings of health leaders, our failure to put vaccines into the arms of people in the developing world is now coming back to haunt us,” Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister and an ambassador with the World Health Organization, wrote in the Guardian.

The one thing that actually could change this will never happen, given how many U.S. Senators and Representatives suck at the money teat of Big Pharma.

What should be done is suspend intellectual property rights in vaccine production and let any company anywhere produce as much of it as they can.

Oh no! Can’t do that!! What are you, a fucking COMMUNIST???? There’s money to be made here, man. A once in a century opportunity.

A few weeks ago, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, Countries with the highest vaccine coverage continue to stockpile more vaccines, while low-income countries continue to wait. Every day, there are six times more boosters administered globally than primary doses in low-income countries. This is a scandal that must stop now.”

On Friday, a World Trade Organization meeting in Switzerland originally slated for this week, where the intellectual property issue was set to be discussed, was canceled..The reason: the new outbreak of omicron.

Does anyone reading this think that when Omicron hits the United States - the question is “when,” not “if” - that we will be prepared for it, that we can do anything about it? Does anyone think that if the Mayor of New York City announced indoor dining was stopped for the duration, that there wouldn’t be riots? And that’s a “Blue State.” “Red” America will go out and party heartier.

There is striking evidence all over the world of past human civilizations that fell because they couldn’t deal with a transmissable virus. Europe came to the point of staring over the cliff’s edge into the abyss during the Black Death; it did end the medieval system, when there weren’t enough serfs left to work the fields, and too few lords to make the survivors work harder.

We aren’t Homo Sapiens, we’re Homo Sap. The hairless biped that lacks frontal lobes and opposable thumbs. Too fucking stupid and ignorant, and proud of the ignorance, to act in our own best interests. Our ancestors survived the Ice Age, but we won’t survive the Twitter Age.

I wish to hell I was wrong. But I’m not.

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