Hanta Yo!

So, we have a new virus to contend with . . . the hantavirus.

Actually, the hantavirus isn't exactly new, like SARS-CoV-2 was in 2019.  It's a virus that's been around quite awhile, and it's gotten attention recently due to numerous passengers on a cruise ship, some of whom have died.  The bad news is that there is no vaccine for it.  The good news is that it isn't as communicable as SARS-CoV-2 - far from it - and so the risk of catching hantavirus disease, which comes from rodent feces (which may lead Fox News "personalities" to refer to it as a Mickey Mouse disease), is as low as politicians in February 2020 thought that le covíde was.  You can catch le covíde by merely breathing.  You have to go out of your way to get hantavirus disease.

But none of that means, while we shouldn't take hantavirus as seriously as le covíde, that we should take it seriously at all.  And Trump isn't taking it seriously.  I don't think he's even talked about it.  He seems to think the situation will take care of itself.  Because of all of the obvious differences between the hantavirus and le covíde, he may be right this time.  But his lackadaisical approach to the hantavirus - if it can be called an approach - revives nightmares of his similar attitude to  le covíde in early 2020.

And while all this in going on . . . Ebola is back in central Africa.

The United States ought to consult the World Health Organization for strategies on how to navigate all this.

It's too bad that the United States formally left the World Health Organization earlier this year per Trump's orders based on his racist Sinophobic attitude involving a controversy over China  - not to mention that its director is an Ethiopian.

You know, that's another reason for me to advocate secession and disunion.  Trump tried to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in 2020, but the Biden administration canceled the process of withdrawal as soon as President Biden took office. This time Trump has succeeded.  As with the Paris Agreement, the United States will not be welcome back into the World Health Organization a third time when a Democratic President tries to undo Trump's action if there's a chance that a future Republican President withdraws the U.S. a third time later on.  Better for an independent New England, a Middle Atlantic republic, or an independent California to join the World Health Organization, as fascist American states like an independent Texas and a revived Confederacy (from which blacks will flee in another great migration northward) will stay out and fall by the wayside. 

WHO Are We Now?

Trump pulled us out of an international agreement as expected, continuing an American tradition of refusing to join the rest of the world in interdependent global endeavors that are perceived to threaten U.S. sovereignty and American big business.

No, I'm not talking about pulling us out of the agreement on fighting climate change, which he did to the sound of cheering supporters who no longer have to worry about giving up their F-150 pickup trucks.  I'm talking about the executive order Trump signed that pulls us out of the World Health Organization.

Trump originally did that in the final year of his first term - 2020, the year of the COVID pandemic - insisting that China was paying too little to support the World Health Organization based on its population and that the United States was paying too much, and that the World Health Organization is in need of serious reform.  (Biden canceled the pullout.)  He's done it again for the same reasons.  Now, I don't know how much of that is true, but it was quite obvious that the organization bungled the response to COVID and let the Chinese hoodwink everyone - including Trump himself - into thinking they were on top of it, as this BBC report explains, and so some sort of reform at the organization (I'm not referring to it as "the WHO," it sounds like I'm talking about a rock band, though Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus's capitulation to Chinese President Xi Jinping in the early days of the COVID crisis could be punningly described as  "The WHO Sell Out") is needed.  So, by that criterion, Trump's order makes sense.

Or it would if he hadn't chosen someone to lead the Department of Health and Human Services whose main qualification for the job was living through birth. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not a doctor but an environmental lawyer who should only be in Trump's White House to handle oil spills.  He opposes vaccines and is too skeptical toward pharmaceuticals without being skeptical enough toward pharmaceutical companies.  I sincerely hope that Senate Democrats oppose Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s confirmation to be Secretary of Health and Human Services with every fiber of their beings, but the lack of fiber Democrats have shown so far toward Trump Mark Two suggests that they tend to have too much Fruity Pebbles for breakfast and not enough Grape-Nuts.  In fact, kind of perversely, some Democratic U.S. Senators are interested in RFK Jr.'s attacks on Big Pharma and Big Agribusiness, and Cory Booker, New Jersey's senior senator, wants to learn more about Kennedy's ideas on improving the food supply.

Even if Kennedy gets us eating heathier food and has the Food and Drug Administration, an HHS agency, do something about additives like high fructose corn syrup, diseases still happen.  Eating wholly organic and natural foods didn't prevent the Black Plague in the Middle Ages.  By pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, Trump is incapacitating the international effort to control diseases and viruses - including the current bird flu wave - and making it more possible for another pandemic as bad as COVID to emerge. 

And then Kennedy will be fired.  Not for bungling the pandemic response, but for objecting to Trump's proposal to inject ourselves with cyanide or whatever.

COVID - The End (Sorta)

This past Friday, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus finally declared the international COVID emergency over after three years, three months, and five days.  The United States - which of course won the booby prize for the highest case and death count of any nation on this earth - ends its emergency on Thursday.

Of course, the rest of the world figured this out long ago.  But though COVID is no longer the threat it was when it had us mask up and lock down, Tedros is asking the world to remain vigilant because COVID is going to be with us until the end of time and it's going to take some time before it truly becomes no worse than influenza.  In fact, the latest strain, Arcturus (sounds like a car), can cause itchy red eyes not unlike springtime allergies.  So now we have to look out for the Arcturus variant (now that sounds like a car, particularly a German station wagon!) and cross our fingers that it doesn't start another massive wave. And Tedros has said that he would not "hesitate to convene another emergency committee should COVID-19 once again put our world in peril."

For now, at least, the COVID scare is over, and many of us are back to living our lives.  I'm not, really.  For reasons both related and unrelated to the pandemic, I continue to refrain from making plans and from getting involved in anything.  I once said that I saw myself going to Europe in 2023 with the assumption that the public health emergency would end by then; despite the end, I have no plans to go this year or any time after.  I just can't see it happening.  With a couple of visits to New York City - my first in four years - behind me, I have no plans to return any time soon, mainly because bus service in my area has been severely curtailed and there's noting in particular I want to see or do in the city.  And, as always, I no longer wish to get involved in any social or political causes, as I remain convinced that it's all a colossal waste of time.        

I'm still in a funk, mainly because I had to give up on my Volkswagen Golf 8 blog (we're never getting the base model in North America) and also because a Facebook friend unfriended me after over a decade and turned out not to be a true friend after all.  Add to that some personal problems I'd rather not go into here and you can understand why I'm now more, not less, reluctant to put my life back together in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Besides, if I withdraw more from public life, I can more easily avoid Arcturus.  

COVID Moment of Truth

Tomorrow, the World Health Organization is to meet to discuss where to end the emergency phase of COVID.  That is, whether they're ready to declare the pandemic over.

If you expect an announcement that the pandemic is ending, don't hold your breath.  On second thought, do hold your breath - it's a good way to avoid getting COVID.

The fact is that since China ended its zero-COVID policy, COVID cases have shot up there like a rocket.  It's spreading so rapidly that it is likely to fall just as quickly, but it's still possibly going to cause a new strain in its wake - a strain serious enough to warrant its own Greek letter.  This hypothetical new strain could keep the pandemic going for another three years.

Some pandits (my term for "pandemic pundits") are critical of efforts of other national governments to test Chinese nationals entering their countries because there's already a lot of COVID outside China that could cause a new strain.  Yes, but there's also a good deal of immunity in the rest of the world because the rest of the world didn't shoot for zero-COVID like China did.  If another strain is going to come from anywhere, it;s where COVID began.

Of course, add American idiots who won't get vaccinated, and you have yourself plenty of reasons why we should expect the emergency to continue . . . and zero reasons why we should not.   

WHO's Fooling Who?

It seems ironic that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), because his pronouncements on the COVID pandemic are making me sick.

An increasing number of experts seem to agree that, even though Omicron won't be the last mutant strain of COVID by a long shot, its antibodies and its rapid spread will combine along with vaccinations and antiviral treatments to turn COVID into an endemic disease.  But Tedros - and, I might add, his minions at the WHO - insisted that the pandemic is "nowhere near over" after two years, even though Tedros began 2022 by saying that we have a chance to end the pandemic this year.

Which is sort of funny, because one of his minions, Michael Ryan, an Irish doctor who's been echoing Tedros' statements, just said early last week that "we have a chance to end the public health emergency this year if we do the things that we’ve been talking about" - such as vaccinating more people in poor countries.

So what is it, guys? Is this pandemic going to continue well into the 2020s or can we get it behind us by June or July?  Of this year, I mean? 

As long as the WHO, which Tedros leads,  keeps contradicting itself, it doesn't matter what message it's putting across.

I'm well aware that African countries, among others, need more COVID vaccines.  I'd be pleased to see President Biden donate all of the COVID vaccines in the U.S. that vaccine-resistant Americans don't want (i.e., most of them).  Tedros himself has been calling for more vaccines for poor countries as a way to end the pandemic  But he hasn't suggested how we could do that and end vaccine inequity, at least as far as I know.  He's mostly been pontificating without offering any constructive criticism.

But then, it's hard for your organization to provide constructive guidance when you let the Chinese government strong-arm you into abandoning an investigation of the origins of a virus that same government allowed to proliferate in its own country and then beyond. 

If Tedros can't offer any suggestions as to how we get out of this mess - it he just keeps talking in admonitory tones with a wag of the finger - maybe he should get out of the way.  Because he clearly isn't leading or following. 

Oh yeah, get vaccinated.

COVID-22

After all, that's what the Omicron strain really is.

Omicron is a new disease that is nothing like the original Wuhan strain of COVID, and it's creating more havoc than even the Wuhan strain did when there were no vaccines.  Mainly because one thing vaccines did not take care of was access to vaccines. But it's also because the virus has mutated to the point where vaccines are less effective.  What if a future strain is completely vaccine-resistant?

Numerous experts have speculated that Omicron is so contagious that the latest surge of infections - already plummeting in South Africa, where the Omicron strain was first detected, and beginning to recede in the United Kingdom - will give us so much immunity in the form of antibodies, in tandem with vaccinations, that it will end the pandemic once the virus can't infect anyone. "Driven by the inexorable, inevitable spread of the Omicron variant and the use of vaccines, the global population will generate immunity to this virus," Australian physician Nick Coatsworth told a news site from Down Under.  Dr. Julian Tang, a respiratory-science professor at Leicester University in Britain, concurs.  "The virus will evolve itself out of the pandemic strain very soon and become milder, more transmissible to the point where you may only need to think about vaccinating the more vulnerable members of the population," he said.

To assume such a thing would mean that there's no chance of the virus mutating into something more contagious, as everyone assumed when Delta was receding. But it obviously did.  And so there's no reason to assume that a new strain - the next Greek letter to be used is pi, by the way - won't be worse than Omicron.  The only solution to avoid new mutations (I won't call them variants, a variant is a German station wagon) and prevent contagion (I won't say "transmission;" it's a virus, not a radio signal!) is to vaccinate more people.

That's where we're really far off.  

In a good deal of the world, many countries have met or exceeded the World Health Organization's year-end goal of vaccinating 40 percent of its populations, even with so much misinformation of and resistance to vaccines.  In the Western Hemisphere, every country has met that goal except for Guatemala, Bolivia, Surinam, Haiti, Jamaica and a few of the countries in the Lesser Antilles.  In Africa, however, you can count on one hand with fingers to spare every country that met that 40 percent standard at the end of 2021.  In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa and, at 211 million people, the seventh most populous country in the world, the full-vaccination rate is a pathetic 2 percent.  And there are other undervaccinated countries in Europe and Asia, as well.  

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has declared that the booster programs of wealthy nations lead to the hoarding of vaccines by these same wealthy nations and deny poorer countries the ability to get more vaccines, which will thus prolong the pandemic by allowing new strains - especially one that throws the proverbial finger to vaccines by evading them completely and making them worthless - to proliferate.  Dr. Anthony Fauci and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy have disputed this, insisting that there are plenty of vaccines for everyone, including boosters, and Dr. Fauci has noted the numerous vaccine supplies the U.S. has already donated for the rest of the world.  American protests of the World Health Organization's lecturing, however, seem irrelevant in light of all the donated vaccines that have expired or have arrived in poorer countries without any plan to distribute them.  One must conclude that the plan to vaccinate the world is not getting anywhere.

Or maybe it is.  As of December 21, the latest date for which data is available, 48.3 percent of the world's population have been fully vaccinated - about 3.76 billion people, with 4.49 billion people, or 57.5 percent of the world's population, have gotten at least one dose.  And if you look at the chart below - click on it to enlarge it and see it better - the vaccination rate is going upward in a steady diagonal climb, with a couple of big jumps in the spring and summer of 2021. 

It's for that reason, as the seriousness of the Omicron surge makes itself clear, that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros (he's Ethiopian, they go by first names there) sees hope and optimism for the pandemic to end in 2022. On the other hand, maybe Omicron will end the COVID plague and turn the virus into an endemic contagion, like the flu.  But we still have to get the rest of the world vaccinated to prevent future strains.  If not, we won't end the pandemic.  The pandemic will end us. 😢 😭

Continental Drift

The pharmaceutical company Moderna announced that it hopes to build a factory in Africa to make COVID vaccines to get the continent's people vaccinated faster to end the pandemic.  Many vaccine donations to Africa have been promised, but few of them have actually been been getting there.

I say that Moderna "hopes" to build a vaccine factory in Africa because the company put out no details of its plans.  Moderna didn't say which African country the factory would be located in, for starters.  Did Moderna say when it would be operational?  It did not.  Did Moderna indicate when the plant would be basically finished - topped out, at least?  It did not.  Did Moderna say when construction of the factory would start?  Negative.

This isn't funny, and I'm sure the director of the World Health Organization, who is from Ethiopia, would be the first to say so.

What Moderna did was get some good publicity, but the company assured no one about its intentions.  Forbes magazine said it best in noting that saying you're going to build a factory without offering specifics is like saying you're going to get married someday without knowing to whom and when.  And Africa needs this factory as soon as possible because the pandemic is killing Africans and possibly causing variants worse than Delta right now.  Many people even believe that Moderna's announcement is really just a PR ploy to avoid allowing the World Health Organization to copy Moderna's vaccine formula for faster production to get more vaccines to where they're needed, which would require a waiver from Moderna's patent.

And, given the vague promises from Moderna, the firm will less likely get a contractor to build its plant and more likely to get Mystico and his lovely assistant Janet to create a factory through hypnosis.  (You have to be a Monty Python fan to get that joke.)

Thus, despite Moderna's non-announcement, the pandemic continues. Meanwhile, in the United States, despite more vaccine mandates, that day-to-day full-vaccination rate continues to increase at a pathetic 0.1 percent.  One day last week, it didn't even go up that much. 😬   

Booster Club

I'm not talking about college alumni.

The federal government is now encouraging booster shots of the COVID vaccine - a third dose for Pfizer and Moderna recipients, a second for Johnson & Johnson recipients - to better protect Americans against this damn virus.  The delta corona has made it desirable - essential, even - to get extra protection, as more "breakthrough" infections - still rare - are reported among the vaccinated.

Well, the folks at the World Health Organization went all potty (pardon my French) over this decision, saying it was selfish of rich countries like the United States (and Israel) to start giving booster shots to their citizens when much of the Third World (notice how no one calls it that anymore? political correctness) goes unvaccinated.  U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy shot back at the complaints, saying that the U.S. needs to give Americans booster shots and give the Third World (he did not actually use that term) inhabitants first and second doses.  His attitude was, "Who says we can't do both?"  The World Health Organization, apparently, as do scientists who say it's premature to be giving them right now.  These scientists also agree with the World Health Organization that it's logistically impossible to give Americans booster while still trying to vaccinate everyone in developing countries.  It's "either/or"  - not both, they all say.  If the Biden administration can satisfy the needs of both Americans and the rest of the world, what it pulls off will more than make up for what's happening in Afghanistan right now.

Incidentally, Americans become eligible for booster shots eight months after receiving their last doses.  As I got my last dose on April 24 of this year, I become eligible on . . . Christmas Eve.

The good news?  I can wait a few weeks to get the booster, so the holidays won't be an impediment for me.     

The One Percent Fallacy

The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that he's always lying, like when he told a crowd at an Independence Day speech in Washington that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases are "harmless."  At the same time, Dr. Anthony Fauci says we're in a place that is "really not good" when it comes to the virus, with Trump, a self-professed "stable genius," countering that Dr. Fauci is providing a "false narrative."

"I think we are going to be in very good shape," Trump said, a sentiment echoed by Mike Pence yesterday.

Pure fiction, all of it, but Trump's comment about the virus being 99 percent harmless isn't technically a lie. It is a statement based on a gross misunderstanding of a fact offered up back in March by, ironically, Dr. Fauci himself.

Here's the deal.  Back in March, Dr. Fauci projected that the death rate among people who contract COVID-19 cases would likely be about one (1) percent.  That may have been so, but Trump has obviously taken this to mean that 99 percent of Americans who get COVID-19 would recover and be fine after that, just like most people recover from the flu - which, like COVID-19, is caused by a coronavirus.  But the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is far more deadly, as Dr Fauci noted that the death rate from the flu is 0.1 percent, meaning that COVID-19 kills ten times as many people as the flu.  And, truth be told (but not by Trump), those who do recover from COVID-19 can and likely will have health problems later on as a result of having had the disease.  

Oh yeah, Dr. Fauci's estimated mortality rate for this pandemic may end up being too optimistic. As of yesterday, July 8, 2020, about 3,038,800 Americans have contracted COVID-19, with a death toll of about 131,700.  Based on those figures, the mortality rate is actually 4.3 percent.  Though, to be fair, it was actually higher at the beginning of the pandemic.

And amidst all this, Trump is officially taking the United States out of the World Health Organization and trying to force localities all over America to reopen their schools for live and in person instruction.

The presidential election can't come soon enough.

"WHO The F**k Are YOU?"

Donald Trump announced this past week that the United States is now withholding funds to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the worst pandemic in over a hundred years.  The only people who approve of this policy are Trump's sycophants, which, I'm sorry to say, include the entire Republican congressional caucus.

Trump's rationale for withhold funds from the WHO is based on is failure to stop the coronavirus from spreading beyond China and taking Chinese assurances of the virus's containment at face value.  Shortly after Trump's announcement, the media started playing clips of Trump from January and February praising the WHO and Chinese President Xi Jinping for their leadership on the virus problem.

It is true that the WHO put too much trust and not enough verification - a spin on Ronald Reagan's favorite Russian proverb, "Trust but verify" - in the Chinese leadership, as Kathy Gilsinan's article in The Atlantic explains.  The WHO was impressed with China's efforts to handle the crisis, even though Chinese coronavirus policy was based largely on wishful thinking and spin.  But the WHO also recognized the severity of the disease and, regardless of how it was going down in China, warned the rest of the world to prepare for a global health emergency.  Trump sort of didn't want to do that.  Now that the United States has the largest umber of coronavirus cases, he's trying to deflect blame to others.  Some government officials overseeing health policy conceded that the WHO made some serious mistakes but caution - their cautions falling of deaf ears, of course - that we should wait until after the pandemic has run its course to assess those mistakes.    

Trump's lack of consistency on many issues - he was once for fighting climate change before he was against it - is annoying even in normal circumstances, but here it's gone beyond the pale.  When he was downplaying the health crisis, he wasn't even consistent with  the WHO while he was praising the organization; he declined the tests it offered to the United States when this disease got serious.  Even if you accept the idea that the WHO let COVID-19 go full tilt boogie, the Chinese still deceived the WHO into making decisions based on unreliable information.  Blaming the WHO for the pandemic is like blaming Eve for the fall of man, even though the serpent in this case is the Chinese Politburo.

A rather loaded analogy, and an ironic one to use a week after Easter, I know, but if the shoe fits . . .