The World Health Organization is warning the Omicron variant can spread more quickly than other variants. That’s likely true, but based on science, that doesn’t mean the variant is more lethal than Delta or others — in fact, it’s probably more mild.
With natural exposure immunity and early outpatient treatment, and when combined with no reports of increased lethality, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) reaction of generating panic toward “Omicron” is causing needless fear and panic.
So, too, with the Biden administration’s newly imposed travel restrictions, which will achieve nothing and will once again disrupt trade and violate human rights.
The WHO has said the Omicron variant can spread more quickly than other variants. Likely true. The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave.
They are mutable and mutate, and via the Muller’s ratchet theory, we expect these to be milder and milder mutations, not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead end.
The virus will mutate downward so that it can use the host (us) to propagate itself via our cellular metabolic machinery. The Delta variant has shown us this: It is very infectious and mostly non-lethal — specially for children and healthy people.
So is the WHO panicking the globe needlessly? Is this COVID-19 February 2020 once again?
The problem with South Africa, similar to Australia and New Zealand and even island nations like Trinidad, is that South Africa has low natural immunity to SAR-CoV-2.
This is because, as we witnessed over the last year and more, if you lock down your society too long and too hard, you deny the nation and population from inching closer to population-level herd immunity.
And you have no economy or society from which to reemerge. You devastate your society for a pathogen that is largely harmless to the vast majority of people, especially children.
Moreover, governments asked us for two weeks to flatten the curve to help prepare hospitals so that they can tend to surges and other non-COVID illnesses. We as societies gave our governments two weeks, not 21 months.
They failed to tend to the non-COVID illnesses, and we locked down the healthy and well (children and young and middle aged healthy persons) while failing to properly protect the vulnerable and high-risk persons such as the elderly.
We failed and it was like killing fields in our nursing homes.
This failure rests on public health messaging and government. Additionally, what did our governments in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia etc. do with the tax money for the hospitals and personal protective equipment (PPE), etc.?
Hospitals must be prepared by now. Governments have failed! Not the people. The task forces have failed, not the people.
These nations thought that they could stay locked down and wait for a vaccine. This is a reasonable view, though I was against lockdowns as they would and did cause crushing harms on especially poor persons and children.
The problem is there was an opportunity cost because the vaccine we were waiting on was…
Read full story [icon name=”arrow-right” prefix=”fas”] The Omicron Variant: Much Ado About Nothing? • Children’s Health Defense