How about more lockdowns and masks and mandates?

By Jarrad Winter

That's a great idea! The world should go on lockdown, feverishly scramble for more vaccines, and impose more mandates. Everyone should get more jabs or lose their jobs. After all, this has all worked so brilliantly heretofore. Look how well the vaxxes have stopped the Wuhan Plague from spreading and becoming delta. Look how decisively they've kept delta from morphing into the wonderfully speedy and mild omicron. And look at the booming employment, low inflation, efficient supply chains, and happy people everywhere. Yes, may we please have some more?

Vaccines that target a virus's spike protein just won't work against the Wuhan Plague. The virus changes too much, particularly in the area of the spike protein. Like yearly flu shots, COVID jabs will have to continue forever (but at an even shorter interval than flu shots because COVID-19 vaxxes start fading after only two months). Even if everyone gets jabbed, we will always be one step behind the next variant. Obviously, we have to detect it first, manufacture a vaccine for it, distribute it, and coordinate stabbing everyone.

Natural immunity offers some significant degree of protection against future infection and severe disease before anyone even knows that the next variant exists. Everyone not at high risk should catch omicron, ideally in some orderly fashion, keeping medical staff and supplies in mind for the unfortunate tiny percentage (of a very large number) requiring significant treatment. That's how the pandemic can be ended quickly. Vaxxes just fill Big Pharma's pockets and turn the world into vaccine addicts.

At the end of the day, omicron is so far off the charts, so mutated, so contagious, that it might not matter at all. Jabbed, COVID-recovered, or naked in the wind, we might just all catch it. Most of us won't notice the infection (40% of the much harsher variants' infections were asymptomatic), but omicron is likely to visit a large portion of the world's population in some form or fashion. Herd immunity seems ready to be forced on the entire planet by powers science cannot yet competently wield or synthetically oppose.