Delta Blues

The World Health Organization has decided to name variants of the SARS CoV-2 virus after Greek letters because it has decided that naming a virus or variant after where it was first detected is stigmatizing and discriminatory.  Apparently the only people who are going to be stigmatized now are . . . the Greeks.

The decision is retroactive, starting with the British variant, though the idea of stigmatizing the people who once ruled half the world across 24 time zones is sort of ridiculous.  The British variant is now called the Alpha variant, the South African one is called the Beta variant, the Brazilian one is called the Gamma variant, and the new one from India is now called . . . the Delta variant.

That out of the way, the Delta variant of SARS CoV-2 promises to be exponentially worse than any variants proceeding it.  It's already raging in Great Britain and it is likely to come to the United States.  The good news?  The mRNA vaccines available today are effective, provided you get both doses of one.  And there's the rub; only 42 percent of Americans have been fully vaccinated so far, and anyone with a partial vaccination will be as likely to catch the Delta variant and possibly die as anyone who doesn't get a shot at all.  Dr. Anthony Fauci (below) has stressed that people in the U.S. need to get vaccinated as quickly as possible to prevent that.

Oh yeah, the pace of vaccination is slowing.  It's still going up a couple of tenths of a percent every day, but as long as a minority of Americans have both doses of Pfizer or Moderna, none of that will matter once the Delta variant gets here.  Oops!  Correction: The Delta variant is already here!  It now accounts for more than 6 percent of all infections in the United States.

We may be a couple of Greek letters away from a variant that no vaccine will be able to stop if not enough folks get a jab.  Get fully vaccinated, people!  I did.  

And having just had my teeth and gums deep-cleaned, I can honestly tell you that a dozen shots of Novocain in your mouth are far more painful than a COVID shot could ever be.  

Wuhan Worries

Remember when Republicans suggested in the early days of the COVID pandemic that the SARS CoV-2 virus might have escaped form a lab in Wuhan, China after having been cultivated there on purpose?  While these same Republicans are blooming idiots, it turns out that they're likely not wrong, at least not in this case.

There is now enough evidence to suggest that the virus - which originated in a city that happens to be the home of a major virology research institute - was in fact developed in the institute lab for study, much likely because of the nasty history China has had with respiratory viruses.  Witness H1N1, the original SARS virus, the avian flu.  Or, if it was not developed in the lab, it might have been discovered in a natural source and been incubated in the lab.  Either way, the Chinese could very well have let the virus escape and gone on to infect the world.  Even Anthony Fauci has refused to rule out that scenario.

The first suggestion that the virus could have been developed in and/or escaped form the Wuhan lab came from former CDC director Robert Redfield, who doubted that a virus like SARS CoV-2 could make the jump from animals to humans so quickly and so efficiently.  And now that there's more evidence that this could be the case, President Biden has authorized further investigation of these claims,  Good luck with that.  The Chinese are so secretive that getting information on the January 6 insurrection without a proper commission will be an easier task.  China's Communist government  refused to cooperate and has forced the World Health Organization to kowtow to its whims because nothing must be allowed to stop its goal of world domination.

Before you go all off on me for spewing Red Menace and Yellow Peril paranoia, please bear in mind that the Chinese are militarizing the South China Sea and threatening the sovereignty of Taiwan, which survives as an example of what a democratic mainland China would look like if the Communists hadn't taken over - sort of like Superman's preservation of the Kryptonian city of Kandor in the Fortress of Solitude after Brainiac shrank it but before the rest of the planet Krypton exploded.  The Chinese are also expanding their soft power by building more infrastructure in Africa and distributing their own COVID vaccine to places like Chile and Seychelles, where people are still getting sick because the vaccines don't work.  More and more countries are getting scared of China - like Japan - and are aiming to do something about it.  China's relations with the rest of the world haven't been this bad since the days of the Cultural Revolution.

And if the state of these looks into the Wuhan lab are any indication, relations between China and other countries are bound to get worse.

And the World Health Organization really ought to consider  reverting to naming diseases after their countries of origin after deciding that it's unfair to do so and thus stigmatize said countries.  Right now, I can't think of a country that deserves stigmatization more than China.

Except maybe Belarus.