I like the comic, hadn't seen that before.
Little Raven wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 10:55 pm
COVID has never been "almost slain." The entire world has steadily lost ground against it since it appeared. It is now endemic not only to the human race but the planet itself, and our vaccines, while great, merely slow it down.
At the risk of being the ackchyually d00d...
We're still in the pandemic. As long as there are uncontrolled outbreaks happening in various parts of the planet, the pandemic status is maintained. Years from now (3? 5?) we''ll (hopefully?) be at the endemic stage where some unknown strain of SARS-CoV-2 is going to randomly spring up, cause some illnesses, and then fade away again. Rabies is an endemic disease of mammals in North America (by way of example).
I point this out because our own President is flubbing around the language and it's confusing the message. There isn't a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" happening right now. Not only is that technically incorrect (which I know, no one cares), but the message it sends is more harmful. That kind of language makes it sound like it's no longer the problem of vaccinated people and that's just not correct at all. Vaccinated people absolutely still need to care about this and do whatever it takes to help convince hesitant family members and friends to get vaccinated. Vaccinated people also need to care and advocate for those that cannot be vaccinated (like kids). As is usually the case, so much of this has turned into a binary status argument and it's not helping.
This goes back to the idea that the vaccine was the "silver bullet" that will fix everything. Without question it changed our course in 2021, but pushing the vaccine and making this a "personal health" narrative was a huge mistake. Pushing the vaccination as the end to masking, social distancing, increased ventilation, etc... is why we're in this mess right now with Delta. I still cannot figure out for the life of me why the NPIs were minimized when they're all so critical in stopping outbreaks. It was known in 2020 we weren't going to vaccinate our way out of this - that didn't change when Biden was elected. And yet...here we are.
That dragon is never going away no matter what people do.
Absolutely; that ship has long sailed. What remains to be seen is what version of SARS-CoV-2 eventually emerges as we race to vaccinate people around the globe and seemingly promote mass-spread events here in the U.S., even still. Once again, America has squandered a tremendous opportunity to squash levels down. Everything prior to January of 2021 didn't help, but I'm not going to lie and say the current administration is doing an (A+) job on messaging right now. How much of that has also been influenced by the almighty dollar, I can't say, but I strongly suspect that just like 2020, the push to press forward as though nothing is happening is being driven by the unrelenting weight of capitalism.
“Kids don’t get Covid”
“Kids get Covid but don’t get ill”
“Kids die from Covid but don’t worry, only kids with pre-existing conditions die”
“Don’t worry, kids also die from drowning or car crashes”
