THEORY: Evaluating Worst Case Scenarios
If the federal government has abandoned disaster planning, why shouldn't we take a stab at it?
Ed’s Note: This article was a very grim and draining experience to write, largely wrapped in gallows humor just to get through the worst of it. My humble apologies for the delay.
As we enter Year Four of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a massively undercounted bodycount, a staggering mountain of newly disabled, and lack of a clear path out of the pandemic - beyond willful delusion - then it’s time to come to brass tacks, and genuinely ask ourselves - how bad could this really get? While this article is laced with a hint of comedic hyperbole, it’s worth expanding our thinking and considering what the future might hold. As new variants with random mutations continue to emerge and spread globally, and governments across the planet have largely abandoned their basic responsibility to their citizenry to mitigate and prevent death and disease, we face what will likely be a very dark chapter for the rest of the 2020s.
Here are a handful of scenarios, not a complete list, but something to consider as “Infinity COVID” has become the mass-infection doctrine heading into 2023.
Scenario 01: Generation “Blooper” aka The Long COVID Generation
For years political leaders, moronic pundits, idiotic tech executives, and other useless pandemic commentators have peddled a delusion that children are essentially “immune” to COVID. There is no justification for this moronic leap in logic, and an unjustifiable amount of children have paid the price. In America alone, we are racing to 2,000 recorded child deaths as a result of COVID:
Beyond deaths from acute infection, we also have a massive sum of children who are facing chronic illness and disability - over half a million in the United States alone, including cognitive and neurological issues. Brain damage. America has already decided to infect the majority of it’s children at least once, with some children on their third, or even fifth reinfection of COVID. We’re not even bothering to track the cumulative, potentially permanent damage this is doing to our children and their developing bodies.
There’s so many unknowns up in the air. How many COVID reinfections can a child survive before their body finally calls it quits? Will they wind up with chronic fatigue, immunocompromised, and unable to think straight? These are all very real problems our children are facing down the barrel of, and the adults have elected to simply refuse to protect them. These kids might wind up burning down the nursing homes when they grow up, with us in them. Sacrificing their lives, their futures, and their freedom so we could go back to brunch and pretend everything was hunky-dory, walking around unmasked & breathing viruses into their lungs.
So what if we just keep repeating our children over and over until most if not all of them fail to pass the virus and wind up with Long COVID? We have about 50 million children in America, and your odds of developing Long COVID increase with every reinfection - even as we repeatedly infect our children multiple times a year. There’s decent odds that we’re breeding an entire generation of brain damaged and immunocompromised cripples.
Things we presently take for granted, like professional sports leagues, pro wrestling, mixed martial arts, the Olympics - becoming a thing of some long forgotten past, because we simply don’t have enough healthy, abled bodies to perform at such a demanding athletic level anymore. The economy grinds to a halt as we run out of abled bodies able to pick up heavy objects and put them down somewhere else for 8-10 hours a day. Would we even qualify as a nation-state, anymore, as the overall health of the nation has completely collapsed? Just a collection of broken bodies, their health shredded by COVID, waiting to be rolled by whatever calamity awaits. It’s not a pleasant picture, but it’s worth examining - as well as preventing.
Scenario 02: The “Super” Variant Awakens
A common myth is that viruses automatically evolve to become “mild” and insignificant over time. Wrong. If you’re familiar with modern videogames, there’s millions of lines of digital code running at any one time - and sometimes, the program doesn’t execute this code correctly, causing bizarre “bugs” to appear before you. Here’s some examples:
When you’re infected with a virus, it is constantly replicating itself inside you, making billions of copies of itself based off its own RNA “code.” Sometimes this “code” is replicated incorrectly, and a new “variant” is born. Now, most variants come and go without a trace. However, some do emerge and become a dominant strain - we went from Alpha to Delta to Omicron and now the many subvariants under the Omicron banner. Here’s a snapshot of the current variant “soup” we’re looking at, from the date of this writing:
With XBB.1.5 now being the dominant variant in New York City, after a failed national booster campaign that targeted BA.5 - after we were promised that MRNA vaccine manufacturers could tweak produce a new variant-targeted booster in a matter of weeks. The Biden Administration has failed to force them to do so. In DC’s brain-trust, the only legitimate use of power is that which is wielded by private interests, even after it has led to disastrous results for the citizenry.
There is no mythical guarantee the next dominant variant will be “milder.” A virus doesn’t have a mind of its own, or subscribe to some nonsensical fictional narrative that lets us pitiful humans just handwave away the dangers that loom ahead of us. Hence the importance of regular COVID testing and viral surveillance. As we’ve conditioned the majority of the population to simply roll over and get COVID repeatedly, then spread it to their family and community, we’ve essentially rolled out the red carpet to let whatever comes after Omicron to rip through the population.
“Public health” is a fact of life - as we live together in a collective society that shares resources such as air and water, we forge chains of transmission for disease to spread through society. Sadistic pseudoscientific pervert pundits like UCSF’s Vinay Prasad would use this as an excuse to do nothing - to let mass infection and death rip through our communities. He consistently lies about the reality of what COVID does to the body, via a large public audience across social media platforms, and declares that letting this virus spread, grow, and evolve - using our bodies as labor for its benefit - is simply “inevitable,” and should actively be encouraged - especially in children.
This simply goes against hundreds, if not thousands of years of human civilization’s advancement - if it was the 1300s, pro-disease pundits such as Prasad would defend dumping your sewage in the streets, as the Black Plague claimed countless lives. If it was the 1800s, pro-disease pundits would insist that drinking feces infected water was a natural and normal part of our great society, to be defended. “We must learn to live with Cholera, and members of our communities regularly & painfully shitting themselves to death.” This is not sound medical advice - it is dangerous disinformation being used to make society much more comfortable with naked eugenics, one of the founding pillars of the fascism that formed the Third Reich of Nazi Germany, killing millions.
The reality is that as you mass infect the population with COVID, you achieve nothing except generate new variants of COVID, and further prolong the pandemic - with many more dead and disabled, and no guarantee of a “mild” end in sight. There’s no reason one of these new variants couldn’t randomly mutate into something far more lethal - and with much of the population having already been repeatedly infected with a virus that weakens their immune system - being served up to the River Styx after years of having their health rammed through a meatgrinder.
Scenario 03: The COVID Collab Event
This is a similar scenario to the one above, but with two viruses being smashed together to form something nastier. Recently in Qatar, millions of people flooded in from around the globe for the World Cup - many actively infected and spreading COVID - a place where the virus “MERS” is endemic. In 2012, an outbreak of MERS had a 34% case fatality rate, according to Boston University. Here’s the kicker - MERS’ full name is MERS-CoV, similar to SARS-CoV-2. Both are coronaviruses, and there’s no reason these two couldn’t combine. With billionaires, governments, and frauds insisting that letting COVID rip through the population is inevitable, and even desirable - it would be far too late to implement proper public health measures before a potential SARS-MERS collaboration rips through the global population.
Scenario 04: COVID Opened the Door, Climate Change Walks Right In
A lot of climate denialism propaganda over the past 20 years has originated from the same place that modern COVID denialism propaganda originates from - rightoid billionaires with too much money & greedy, sadistic little excuses for “experts” willing to grow a media platform by misleading the public. Now that we’re looking at potential scenarios where after COVID has mass infected the population, repeatedly, and weakened their immune systems - climate change is releasing a whole new palette of viruses available for the next great pandemic wave. As Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic - “We Created the ‘Pandemicine:”
Earth’s changing climate is forcing animals to relocate to new habitats, in a bid to track their preferred environmental conditions. Species that have never coexisted will become neighbors, creating thousands of infectious meet-cutes in which viruses can spill over into unfamiliar hosts—and, eventually, into us. Many scientists have argued that climate change will make pandemics more likely, but a groundbreaking new analysis shows that this worrying future is already here, and will be difficult to address.
Well, great news everyone - after letting deranged libertarian billionaires dismantle any sort of ideal of public heath as an essential aspect of a modern, civilized society - they won’t be addressed whatsoever! Quarantines? A criminal civil rights violation! Lockdowns? The literal apocalypse! PPE? Sounds like some sort of sex toy for liberal groomers, I say! Instead, the dominant messaging will be encouraging bestiality in order to generate “natural immunity,” and anyone dying from whatever the next pandemic virus ends up being - was weak, frail, and totally deserved it. Continued:
Even under the most optimistic climate scenarios, the coming decades will see roughly 300,000 first encounters between species that normally don’t interact, leading to about 15,000 spillovers wherein viruses enter naive hosts.
Oh, sweet. It’s like an Eldritch Infinity Engine of unlimited disease. You thought Zero COVID was too ambitious of a goal to work towards? You “learned to live with” Infinity COVID? (You didn’t. The powers that be forced it upon you.) Congratulations - now you get to live through Infinity Every Virus Imaginable. With a likely already weakened immune system, many more people will be at risk for death or post-viral disability than they have been led to believe by governments and pundits when it comes to COVID.
Scenario 05: The Rise of COVID-Birthed Fascism
According to the Brookings Institute, there are already millions of Americans who can no longer work due to Long COVID-induced disability. Tens of millions of Americans are presently suffering from Long COVID in one form or another. From the far right naked fascists to many prominent liberal pundits such as Natalie Shure of the New Republic, who has zero medical expertise, this is all just an elaborate work of fiction. These millions of Americans are a bunch of layabout grifters, making this all up - it’s all in their heads, actually, and there’s nothing harmful about repeatedly being infected with a virus that attacks the heart and the brain, leaving cumulative damage.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, there were quite a few rightoid protestors with a sign that said we should abandon all precautions and simply “sacrifice the weak,” the infirm, and any other American this brain genius decided was simply “lesser,” as long as he could go to Outback Steakhouse and enjoy a Bloomin’ Onion without any sort of inconvenience. What was originally a fringe view has now become mainstream, as 80,000-100,000 Americans who were vaccinated have died as a result of breakthrough infections. Millions more disabled, hundreds of thousands of children losing a primary caregiver, and now “pragmatic progressives” such as Michah Escobedo, useless “digital comms” manager for Sen. Bob Casey, Jr. (PA) in Washington, DC has fully adopted the hard right eugenicists view of endorsing mass death and disability, as long as he gets his treats and goodies without delay.
You, as someone who has to actually work for a living, are expected to be repeatedly infected, disabled, and die. So Micah Escobedo can pretend that he got to “move on.” You don’t get to move on, because you’re not part of the privileged class of useless D.C. intern failsons & faildaughters who have nothing to contribute to society, and are simply goosestepping to some overpaid corporate do-nothing gig, leeching their way through the upper echelons of America’s economy. People like Micah are the “real people” in American society. You, on the other hand, are simply disposable chattel.
So, unable to fully grind this growing population of millions of Americans being forced into disability, and the poverty & suicidal thoughts that follow, into obscurity out of the public eye - what’s next?
What if… we just get rid of these cripples, says the clever D.C. intern looking to advance his career. I mean hey, it worked for the Germans, and they got all their best ideas from us, anyways. A large part of the Holocaust was murdering countless disabled people - including people disabled by the First World War, and victims of the 1918 pandemic. Ooh, awkward. “These cripples are a burden on our society, let’s round them up in camps, and then close our eyes as Nazi stormtroopers execute them en masse.” Could this happen with Long COVID patients? In America, we don’t support the disabled. We hope they quietly suffer and die out of sight and out of mind. Yet…
Feb 25, 2022 - Rolling Stone: “First They Got Long Covid. Then, It Made Them Homeless”
Sep 9, 2022 - Reuters: “Long COVID's link to suicide: scientists warn of hidden crisis”
Aug 9, 2022 - WFLA: “Miami advances plan to [forcibly] move homeless onto island.”
Sept 11, 2019 - WaPo: “Trump officials tour unused FAA facility in California in search for place to [forcibly] relocate homeless people”
As liberals abandon public health and the disabled, just like they abandoned Black & brown people by rallying behind Biden - a champion of militarizing police and illegal wars overseas that have killed, tortured, raped, and devastated millions - they have served up a turnkey tyranny to fascists for them to seize and carry out horrific, sadistic acts of justice against the most vulnerable, ensuring the same fascism they swore they were preventing by screaming “vote blue no matter who” down the throats of the marginalized and disadvantaged.
Repeating history, one can extrapolate where this ends. With metropolitan American liberals in ruined cities being dragged through the concentration camps erected by the same fascists they claimed to oppose, with the rifles of foreign soldiers pressed into their backs, forced to bear witness to the atrocities they quietly tried to “move on” from. It’s the same playbook - the fascist keeps nibbling away, little by little, seeing just what they can get away with - the liberal whimpers and bends, preaching a need for “normalcy” above justice or human decency - and soon enough, your children are wearing paper uniforms in the streets, clutching live hand grenades as they charge enemy infantry squadrons in suicide charges. (This actually happened in 1945 Berlin.)
Abandoning your responsibility to your fellow citizen, regardless of identity or your own desire for “normalcy” in a national crisis such as COVID, demanding the disabled and those newly disabled by COVID suffer and die quietly, doesn’t simply damn yourself. It damns your family, and your children, and it damns their future. As hard as this might be to accept, we are stumbling into a horrific cycle that will only be exacerbated by climate change & the rise of ecofascism.
It is time to cultivate that moral backbone and use it to stand, not just for yourself, but for your family and your community - and stand against what might possibly be oblivion itself - or at least will be for countless Americans in 2023.
You may have thought parts of this article were satire, but it is actually horribly accurate. All across the world. Excellent, sobering writing. Thank you.