The Omicron variant of the COVID virus is here. It’s time to get boosted.
The new variant is doubling in cases every day or two and has now become the dominant variant in the United States (and probably the world). Up until now, the normal two dose vaccine regime (with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines) has been enough, but protection from Omicron requires the third, booster, dose.
As reported by CNN, the protection offered from two-dose mRNA vaccines — like those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — is “quite good particularly against severe disease,” Fauci said Sunday.”But when you get to Omicron, the protection significantly goes down,” he said. “But the good news is when you boost someone, it goes right back up.”
If you’re unvaccinated, your risk of dying from COVID is 20 times greater than if you’re vaccinated. The risk is 10 times greater of testing positive than fully vaccinated people who have received the booster dose.
As I’ve written before, vaccination is safe, free, and necessary. It’s how we deal with infectious diseases. Every single person who refuses to get the COVID vaccine has been safely and necessarily vaccinated many times before. It’s why they aren’t already dead. This isn’t hard.
Lack of vaccination is a particular problem in Republicans and in “red” states. While big cities still have a problem due to density issues (which helps the virus spread faster), it is “red” states who have the lowest vaccination rates. Mississippi and Alabama have the highest rates of death in the United States, despite the overall low population and density.
If you live in a county that voted for Donald Trump, you have the highest death rate in the nation. In fact, you are more than three times more likely to die from COVID than “Biden counties.” Why? Because the Republican party has outright lied to you over and over. The Republican party has flooded you with so much false information – disinformation – that they are literally increasing your chances of death. Needlessly. Intentionally. The Republican party sees it as a way to manipulate you, risking your life as they lie to you for votes. It is literally causing death.
That lack of vaccination is deadly. According to Worldometer, there are now 5.4 million deaths worldwide from COVID. The United States is the worst, both in cases and deaths with over 825,000 deaths from COVID. Given the trend and the lack of vaccination in a country that has made vaccines free and easy to get, that number could easily hit 1,000,000 deaths. Perhaps half of those were avoidable.
All you need to do is get vaccinated and we can return to a semblance of normal life. Those who most vocally complain about not having a normal life are the same ones not getting vaccinated, and thus the reason we can’t get back to that normal life. They are also the reason so many have died.
Get vaccinated. And if you’re already fully vaccinated, get the booster shot.
It saves lives, saves the economy, and gets us back to normality.
David J. Kent is an avid traveler, scientist, and Abraham Lincoln historian. He is the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World as well as two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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Hot White Snow 
Prior to leaving for my travels to stay with more Northern siblings, the booster was not available in my Florida neighborhood. So I made an appointment at a MA pharmacy ahead of time. They do them 24 hours a day. I arrived at 1 AM to find the place deserted. However, the next day, they fulfilled the booster promise. Bit of an odyssey.
Side effects for me were almost nil, just a bit of shoulder discomfort. One sibling was more inconvenienced.
Getting vaccinated is much more convenient than actually experiencing the excursion.
I am not sure that the appeal to global uniformity works for the paranoid.
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The possibility of minor discomfort versus protection from a deadly disease doesn’t seem like much of an inconvenience. Most people refusing to be vaccinated are doing so out of some misguided idea it qualifies as “owning the libs” or “refusing to bow to socialism/communism/[insert other nonsensical self-contradictory platitude they got off Fox News (all of whom have been vaccinated despite them telling their viewers its a socialist plot)],” which seems to be the driving force for most “conservatives” these days. Not much difference from how plantation owners conned non-slaveholding whites in the South to protect the wealth of those plantation owners at the expense (and lives) of those poorer white Southerners.
Not sure what you mean by “global uniformity.” Many parts of the globe are begging for vaccines that they don’t have the resources to get themselves, hence why the US is sending hundreds of millions of doses overseas.
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Just trying to understand what sorts of paranoia unify leftists and fascists in antivaxism.
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Ah. Not sure their reasons for antivaxism are the same. Same outcome doesn’t mean they couldn’t take different routes to get there. That said, there is a similar hypocrisy to each side – both say they don’t trust government, yet both want a government with more power.
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Got my Moderna booster within 24hrs of the first approval. Virtually no side effect. (My first shot was the miserable one.) My husband got his booster (also Moderna) about a week later… he had an unpleasant night. Regardless, nothing serious.
No politics, one way or the other. Just self-preservation and lowered stress.
It does sound as though, especially for younger patients, that it’s wise to go somewhere where they will aspirate the vaccination (make sure that it’s being done intramuscular). Myocarditis and pericarditis with the mRNA vaccines, while uncommon, seems to be associated with incidental intravenous injection.
Also sounds like the latest variant is accounting for little more than “cold symptoms” in most vaccinated adults (who notice anything at all)… good news! Maybe this will be its last hurrah.
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Mine was Pfizer through booster with nothing more than a sore spot on my arm. It’s easy and free and necessary.
From what I can tell, a good part of the limited effect of omicron is that so many are already vaccinated. Still, hospital ICUs are packed and people are dying.
I’m way beyond desperate for this last hurrah (and the last one and the one before that) to be the actual end. I’m trying to plan big events for May for the Lincoln Memorial centennial and all the indoor venues in DC are afraid to commit because of uncertainty of where COVID will be at that time. At least the main event is outdoors.
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Seems to me that the virus has evaded most deterrents to its spread except for vax and breathing hygiene. I would be tempted to consider a relaxation on border controls in favor of more aggressive vaccination efforts.
I have never been able to listen to an anti-vaxer (years ago on the left, today on the right) for any extended period. Just not in my repertoire
In my county about 10% of people have had COVID.
I do like to speculate on what would have been the public action 200 years ago to such a disease. I think the 1919 flu framed a lot of opinion for the next generations, even if you didn’t know it.
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I doubt anything short of tackling people and sticking them with vaccine is going to get many more vaccinated. Those who aren’t political tools/idiots have already gotten vaccinated and will get boosters as necessary.
I wonder if conservative anti-vaxxers realize they are now in bed with liberal anti-vaxxers. The difference, of course, is that anti-vaccine is now a conservative political choice, the lack of vaccination is killing innocent people, and it reflects a huge percentage (majority) of the Republican party, as well as a plank in the party platform, whereas the liberal anti-vaxxers were/are still a tiny percentage of the Democratic party and considered to be irresponsible morons.
I don’t have the numbers, but there were anti-maskers for the 1919 flu. I don’t think they were a large percentage, and they were ostracized by family and friends, as they should be. As for vaccines, I don’t think there were any specifically available (maybe they used the smallpox vaccine) and the technology for developing a vaccine was limited. Today we have the mRNA technique (Pfizer and Moderna) and still can use the virus-based vaccine technique (J&J), along with equipment and funding for development that wasn’t available then. Bottom line – millions of people died because we didn’t have the tools or knowledge to prevent it in 1919, whereas today, we do have the tools and knowledge, but too many selfish anti-science morons who refuse to get vaccinated, thus causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands more people than would likely have otherwise died.
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I am always skeptical about “science” knowing the whole story. But there is a difference between being a clear danger to the health of others and having a few healthy grains of salt. I think the shear scale of the viral evolutionary pool is daunting. Just such a huge population constantly adapting to find a chink.
My recollection from talking with my grandparents is that they were much more inclined to attribute human successes, failures, and disease upon genetics and associations than today’s society. Perhaps a more Darwinist view of sociology than is accepted post-Hitler. They were paranoid about hygiene and cooking food adequately though. Not sure what scared that obsession with hygiene into folks growing up around 1900 but it took hold with many.
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I’m not sure where anyone claims that science has the whole story. As you know, science is iterative, accumulative, and to some extent, collaborative. When rejecting science, it comes down to being skeptical about something we don’t much about versus denying reality because your political party says to do so in order to stay “pure.” You can’t reject vaccines because you don’t know what’s in it, then slug random chemicals someone on the internet says will “cure” the virus you otherwise say is a hoax. Mental jumping jacks isn’t skepticism.
I suppose each generation has its paranoias instigated by whatever societal calamity defines their age. It reflects a deep-seated insecurity in humans. Whether it’s Darwinist or some instinctual biochemistry that once saved us from being eaten by large predators, I don’t know. But it sets us up to be easily manipulated by those who have no hesitation to manipulate, always to better their own positions than to help the masses. It pretty much explains war, religion, and political parties.
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Distinguishing science from what is purveyed as science is the interesting bit. There are many degrees of it, some honest and many not. But there are many that do not even try. The lunatic wings are just that; it is as if lunacy is a goal. But that is biology.
Refining the science is something else. Occasionally there are upheavals in even the science though.
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Most of the time it isn’t that hard to tell science from “what is purveyed as science.” And yes, many don’t even try, especially if they’ve been trained all their lives to disdain anything that doesn’t fit their political ideology.
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I think that is the crux of the issue. Bias and indoctrination prevent rational interpretation of information. I don’t think it is easy to admit to errors But it happens with time. The significant opponent is the disinformation administered by the wealth holders. Somewhat like preventing slaves from learning to read.
I’m a bit conflicted on that though. Free press is essential. Some regulation of scale is necessary. But I digress.
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I suspect that most people who “admit their errors” aren’t actually doing so, they just adopt a new view without acknowledging (or even recognizing) that it contradicts their previous view. Just look at Trumpers calling COVID a hoax while complaining that Trump doesn’t get credit for developing a vaccine (to protect you against that hoax?). WV Senator Manchin, for example, just signed on to a huge increase in Defense spending without even batting an eye at the cost, right after complaining the BBB bill “costs too much.” We are constantly intellectually dishonest with ourselves, which is why so much of the US population is so easily manipulated into hurting their own interests.
Your slaveholder/wealthholder comparison is apt. In fact, it’s exactly what is happening now (with racial caste instead of actually enslaving people).
I agree free press is essential. In Lincoln’s time, the press was owned by the parties, and they were egregiously dishonest in their presentation of the “news.” They were all Fox News/OANN/InfoWars/Breitbart. Mostly people didn’t have a choice of their source of information. Today we do have a choice, and we choose to reinforce our biases rather than learn.
The press is just like any other industry (literally, in the sense that the press are all owned by big industry corporations). We can’t count on them to self-police because it works against their corporate interests to do so, no different than if they were a chemical company, a defense contractor, or a multinational fossil fuel conglomerate. But, how do we regulate a free press such that it stays free? Aye, there’s the rub.
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Interesting conversations. Distracted with the local state-of-emergency caused by thousands of trapped X-mas tourists who ran the basin out of food and fuel before sliding into each other on the Sierra passes and blocking their own escapes, I hadn’t been giving the latest virus paranoia much thought. However, I do think that the recent local ignorant tourist-versus-weather fiasco simply exemplifies that humans both tend to engage in much short-term wishful thinking, and that we aren’t actually all that good at risk assessment.
On the 26th, I had my yearly dinner get-together with the local Filipino compadres. Of the half who were refusing vaccines at this time last year (the ones who aren’t nurses), ALL of them contracted Covid at some point. Two were pretty decked for several weeks; but no one ended up hospitalized. “Hands of God” and all that. Whatever works for you, I say. My libertarian bent tells me there’s no “treatment” either for one’s beliefs, or identity… so move on.
Looking at the actual CDC numbers in the US, and doing some international comparisons, I also think that much of the real story has not been communicated. Yes, Covid has certainly ended a great number of lives prematurely… but by how much is not so clear. The *average* American Covid death has included FOUR comorbidities, and I think this speaks to both lifestyle issues and to a health care system that can’t protect the vulnerable. Add in that inability to make good risk assessments, and let’s just say that this isn’t Japan.
The Japanese population isn’t suffering epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and drug addiction. Meanwhile, the country’s actual *health care system* worked to protect its vulnerable population, mainly the elderly. So despite months where millions of unvaccinated commuters were packing into trains while the Japanese government waited for the results of their own vaccine trials, they didn’t suffer the mass deaths that characterized the US experience. Now, a more trusting population has reached that magical 70% mark, and all without any fear-mongering or threats.
I think this whole US fiasco has revealed some epic cracks in our broader culture, which seems to be fundamentally motivated by fearfully hyperbolic rhetoric and an irresponsible sense of personal entitlement. Unfortunately, the result has been to allow for a great deal of natural selection.
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I’m not sure 465,000+ cases in one day qualifies as “virus paranoia.” As always, it’s the “irresponsible sense of personal entitlement” of people who refuse to be vaccinated that screw the rest of us. I’ve reached the point where I don’t care if unvaccinated people die, but I do care that they might be taking ICU space and medical personnel away from those who have been more responsible and/or have unrelated serious medical issues. Driving drunk can have serious ramifications on other people; so does refusing a vaccine, especially since every single person refusing it have likely had a dozen vaccines already during their lifetime. So the choice to endanger others is irresponsible.
Of course we aren’t good at risk assessment. Humans are, as Dan Ariely puts it, predictably irrational. We worry about the risk of shark attacks but not smoking. We worry that a few thousand billionaires might have to pay an estate tax (that 99+++% of Americans will never pay), but not that a schoolteacher pays a higher percentage of her pay than said billionaires. The list is endless.
Your point about comorbidities is accurate and valid. Americans are a mess, health-wise. That doesn’t mean someone else gets to increase their risk from a nearly preventable death. Some of that health deficit is instigated, if not encouraged, by 200+ years of societal discrimination that continues today.
As for irresponsible personal entitlement, I agree, although I suspect we have different views of who is guilty of it.
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There is an implicit goal in much of this discussion. I like living another day to learn something else. Much biology has similar goals. Perhaps those goals are accepted as given by most. It is the information that requires conservation.
There are enough statistical quandaries in this puzzle to stay in play for a few more decades. I wonder about the regional problems in the Balkans and in native South American populations. I also would like to run the numbers on MediCare projections for the next 5 years.
Hyperbole is an essential element to any optimization method. It just sucks to see things exploited for a rabbit hole.
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I see a spectrum, and I’d like to think I fall in a pragmatic middle. There’s an unemotional, analytical aspect to sound decision-making. But humans have limbic-systems.
Good gamblers (and day-traders) understand both the mathematics of the game, and their own as well as others’ the emotional drivers. And in that way, I find myself encouraged. The game-theory of a virus is that it will evolve into increasingly virulent but less lethal forms. Eventually, this won’t be a SARS anymore… omicron apparently barely qualifies. And my socio-emotional investment in others ends with their own decision-making.
My ski partners and I all require each other to wear avalanche beacons/locators when we ski in the backcountry because it improves our odds. Regardless, if any skier dies in an avalanche, with or without a beacon, that doesn’t mean that requiring one will make people any more personally responsible.
Likewise, three of my Filipino friends who contracted Covid caught it from someone who didn’t mention that he had a “cold”. And now the vaccines are mostly just reducing symptoms. So perhaps it’s time to let people experience the natural consequences of their own decisions? The vaccines have been easily available to everyone for a long time now, but a nanny-state can’t save us from ourselves. And society shouldn’t be held hostage by others willing to suffer self-inflicted injury.
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Over 1,300 Americans died yesterday from COVID, plus whatever number Florida isn’t reporting.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
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My mother missed out on getting vaccinated by a matter of weeks. What irked me at the time was the inability of nursing facilities to manage their staff effectively. There were a lot of rules, but the spirit of reducing spread was not really followed in the facility. There is a part of human nature that loves to skirt rules. But i have a lot of beefs with long-term care facilities.
I am not a huge travel buff after years of transatlantic commuting, but I have a list that is slowly accumulating. Someday.
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I was impressed by the US vaccine rollout. But the inability to protect vulnerable populations was inexcusable, and the politicized hysteria hasn’t been to anyone’s benefit.
Watched New Year celebrations in Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul early this AM after chatting with my sister, presently living in Japan. Planning some spring/summer travels right now. I’m pretty much done worrying.
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Not arguing the numbers, only the context. Vaccinated? Comorbidities? Variant? Setting? Incidental test result? These make a difference, so I’ll just refer back to my first comment.
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I am curious about how the economics of having your vulnerable population culled so severely in different countries plays out on a ten-year time scale. Harsh, I know, but a reality. Certainly implications for health care (assuming we get past the crisis), education, family care and so on. Knock on effects for many other areas.
I would reckon some reading about ecological dynamics would be in order. But that might be too filled with chaos for some.
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Good questions… new, less squeezed response forthcoming.
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Sorry David for wandering off with a big, perhaps way off-topic comment here. Responding to estebang… Reacting to the mention of Herbert Spencer in the materials associated with a recent article, I ended up re-reading several texts from my college days. These included Darwin’s, “The Descent of Man” (I skipped “Origin of Species”), followed by Loren Eiseley’s, “Darwin’s Century”, and Stephen Jay Gould’s, “Ever Since Darwin”. Your words reminded me that Darwin’s writing reveals a humane individual, committed to “civilization” as a protector of the weak. But I’d forgotten his own misgivings about how nature would treat such humanity in the long term.
Eiseley seemed to see “humanity” itself as a part of the same system-of-life that Darwin was describing in “Origin…” He even ended “Darwin’s Century” by quoting Darwin, that, “…animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all melted together.” Eiseley certainly seems to have been a sincere man. But whether or not he was hopeful in that regard, I can’t say.
I’d also forgotten how much I disliked Gould until coming upon my old notes in the margins. Not that I necessarily disagreed with many of his perspectives (though perhaps more philosophically), and he was certainly an advocate of humanity. But I always felt that he had come to his conclusions first, and then cemented them in place as “science” by merely selecting the facts that fit.
The economics of a culling… perhaps there’s an inevitability to a sort of social Darwinism. Darwin appealed to the social value of intelligence, that the efficiency of a society or of its parts (and thus ability to compete selectively) is determined by cognitive as opposed to physical power. Certainly, in this age where the “spoils-of-war” have become rather an oxymoron, it’s human creative capital that powers modern economics… Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Germany…
So the answer to the question may be held less in the financial burden of caring for the physically weak than in the intellectual cost of losing that segment of a population. Mother Nature seems a terribly uncaring custodian. But if Eiseley, and perhaps Darwin were correct, she’s still in charge of the family.
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I was thinking about changes in costs with elder care and reductions in electoral feedback from that segment. One might consider the population changes that have occurred in other cataclysms. I was considering how the demographic shift would play out. Not anything Lorenzian, but I think rather more like post WWII.
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Costs, and not just for the elderly, are certainly of some significance. But I suspect that lost electoral feedback as well as a rebound by relatives and survivors could result in some degree of punctuation to political equilibrium. It could be argued that the US undergoes these kinds of tectonic shifts every now and then. The idea of the nation and what it represents has certainly evolved in steps over time, each a sort of reinvention… Revolutionary, Constitutional, Jacksonian, Reconstruction, Progressive, New Deal, Post WWII, and now? But to be honest, I think there are other economic drivers that will more affect the shift in that regard, however it goes. Not that I’m a supporter, but I suspect that Warren Mosler likely represents the general direction of the US’s economic future as something more “statist”, at least for ordinary citizens.
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Concur. But the global repercussions are significant. I think that is the distinguishing feature….just global scale. And fast moving. But then most things move faster with time.
I do wonder about cultural changes that will be induced too. Something along the lines of the hirsute tuberculosis fashions. Was it safe to have a beard?
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https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/12/jen-psaki/data-suggests-unvaccinated-are-20-times-more-likel/
October data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated and boosted.
Researchers in Texas reached the same conclusion looking at September data.
CDC data from November also indicated that unvaccinated people were about 17 times more likely to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated.
Data from the omicron variant-fueled surge in December and January is preliminary and incomplete but early reports from New York City and Seattle suggest a continued and significant gap in the experiences between vaccinated and unvaccinated who become infected.
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