​​​The burden of proof was always on public health as an institution to demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 is a harmless virus to catch over and over. That the vaccines prevent the virus from forming immune-dysregulating reservoirs in our tissues, rather than merely keeping us out of the hospital. Instead of meeting that burden — or applying anything remotely resembling the precautionary principle — the tendency of the most privileged among us to engage in the most reckless form of wishful thinking imaginable was enabled full force.

Now, as our vaccines continue failing to prevent transmission, the virus continues acquiring vaccine-evasive adaptations, free to cause harm that unfolds on the scale of years.

An imperfect analogy for covid vaccination — that nevertheless works on multiple levels — is that if a SARS-CoV-2 infection is like a car crash, the vaccine is like an old seatbelt that you need to replace often. 'Crash' is some ambiguous threshold of significance, and the collision speed is the initial viral load. The seatbelt obviously doesn't prevent the crash — only safe driving and the safe driving of others can do that — but it does mitigate some of the harm. Now imagine that you never fully heal from the injuries and are in multiple crashes per year.

Worldwide, this looks like tens of millions of missin people. In the US, there's been a sharp rise in the amount of people who report having a disability, while UnitedHealth Group has reported the highest levels of arthritis, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease(s), chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, depression, and diabetes in America's Health Rankings history. Every single condition on their list has been connected to covid.

None of this is normal. That is, unless the landscape of what is normal has been changed by the endemicity of a vaccine-evasive, immune-dysregulating, thrombogenic, highly-contagious virus. To accept this is to accept social murder-suicide.

The clinically vulnerable, in particular, have been abandoned by those with the means and social leverage to act differently — and more importantly, to model an alternative — who are fine with enabling the silent spread of a virus only considered dangerous to some.

With no support given to those 'some,' they become expendable. As Anthony Fauci put it, "the vulnerable will fall by the wayside," a shameless admission of the eugenic attitude at the center of the desire to return to a mythical state of normal. An admission that when neoliberalism holds the world (and our imaginations) hostage, eugenics-by-socioeconomics — Friedrich Engels called it social murder — is actually the norm.

"What are you proposing we do?"

Act like the pandemic never ended, because it didn't.

If the silent spread of a virus that most immediately affects the poor, vulnerable, disabled, and marginalized is considered allowable — because infection is considered inevitable, or prevention unthinkable (it's not; that's just what life is when the planet throws you a curveball this large) — then the dominoes of what else is considered allowable are already falling, and there's no coming back from what that says about you. Unless you decide that the situation is what it is: sickeningly unacceptable.

It may seem like people have consented to risking each other's health, but that doesn't mean their consent is informed. It doesn't mean their family doctor who says that it's okay is informed.

The boundary is this: if you know that you can spread an airborne virus unknowingly — and you aren't going out of your way not to, with the means at your disposal — then you are spreading it knowingly.

If you're a parent with kids in school, ask yourself what you would do if a virus that your children were allowed to be infected with — repeatedly — were destroying their microvasculature and intracellular defenses over time, because there is one doing that.

Ask your kid if any of their friends are too tired too frequently to play anymore. Have an explanation that centers the wear and tear their bodies are going through because of a serious virus that isn't going away. Help them understand that our bodies can't build permanent immunity to it because it's smarter than our bodies. Believe kids when they describe problems with their brains or bodies that won't go away.

Ask yourself why this kind of damage is allowed to be normal, and what that says about the kind of world being normalized.

Remember the Great Barrington Declaration? It was brought to us by the very same people who brought us climate change denial. Believing that herd immunity is possible with a coronavirus is like believing that industrial quantities of carbon dioxide aren't enough to raise the surface temperature of the planet. It's unscientific nonsense, and folks who know better when it comes to climate change should know better when it comes to covid.

Recognizing the science, but believing that nothing can be done about it is worse. Unlike the consumer carbon footprint, the chains of transmission that each person is responsible for are not dwarfed by corporations and militaries. Every single interruption in the chain saves uncountable lives.

No one has to grow up sheltered. There are tools that work if we have the courage to use them (and use them well). If we have the courage to embody values that reflect reality instead of conformity. Someone can make more of a difference than they know.

References:

1. CDC – Reported Tuberculosis in the United States, 2023
2. Science Translational Medicine – Tissue-based T cell activation and viral RNA persist for up to 2 years after SARS-CoV-2 infection
3. [Why the Covid Vaccines We Have Are Not Enough]
4. Salon – Why long COVID could be a ticking time bomb for public health
5. Our World in Data – Estimated cumulative excess deaths during COVID-19, World
6. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – Population With a Disability, 16 Years and over
7. UnitedHealth Group – America's Health Rankings 2023 annual report: Chronic conditions on the rise
8. [Covid Fact Sheet]
9. Death Panel – Covid Year Four (12/12/23)
10. British Journal of General Practice: Life & Times – Health inequality and COVID-19: the culmination of two centuries of social murder
11. Violet Blue – Huge, FREE covid safety
12. TIME – Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
13. Leslie Exp – Plague is a Racket: Disaster Capitalism and the Pandemic