When Does a Pandemic End?
When Does a Pandemic End?
Biden's Reinfections Are a Grim Reminder of Failed, Arrogant Policy
On July 7th, 2024 at a re-election campaign event, Joe Biden declared that he “ended” the COVID-19 pandemic, and that corporate profits doubled. Priorities.
Ten days later on July 17th at a re-election campaign event, Joe Biden tested positive again for COVID-19, in what is at least his third bout with the virus as an elderly man over the age of 80. His condition is reportedly stable at the time of this writing, but when showing symptoms, he actively mingled with the public unmasked, fragrantly spreading the deadly and disabling virus (Twitter) to the same constituents he claims to be seeking the votes of.
While the majority of the country has been lulled into wrongly believing that that SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is long behind us, it's worth deconstructing the definition of "pandemic" and how so many have been lulled into a false sense of closure through multiple incorrect, unscientific definitions. From there, we'll evaluate what an actual end to the COVID-19 pandemic would resemble, and the future ahead of us.
Failed Strategy #1: Denial
This is your standard anti-vax garbage conspiracy theory slop: That viruses don't actually exist, that SARS-CoV-2 is simply a rebranded flu virus, or that COVID-19 is only a threat to "the vulnerable" or the elderly, or that Long COVID disability is simply mental illness, or some other form of outright denial of scientific fact: Denial is one of the most immediate coping mechanisms triggered by a fear response.
Unfortunately, this charade has already cost the health and lives of many Americans, who refused a free vaccine that would have protected them (NPR) from the worst effects of COVID-19. Uptake of updated boosters for the latest SARS-CoV-2 variants has unfortunately fallen off as well, as many Americans have been misled into believing that the pandemic is seemingly "over."
Failed Strategy #2: Politicization
![Jay Bhattacharya tweets: "If the media and some badly mistaken scientists manage to convince the politicians that there is a pandemic, then we will have a pandemic." Later: "Covid is over. It is here forever and there is no technology we have to make that not true. [False] I am sorry you feel sick and I hope you get better soon. [Lie]"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F296d595a-3e8c-4dcf-9f39-e7f285bb4f59_950x851.jpeg "Jay Bhattacharya tweets: \"If the media and some badly mistaken scientists manage to convince the politicians that there is a pandemic, then we will have a pandemic.\" Later: \"Covid is over. It is here forever and there is no technology we have to make that not true. [False] I am sorry you feel sick and I hope you get better soon. [Lie]\"")
If we consider a "pandemic" to be a solely political construct, as argued by Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, a laptop class academic and viral sycophant owned by the Koch billionaire oil dynasty, then a pandemic is merely an abstract ideal. If its boundaries are dictated solely by politicians and the actions they take in response to the alleged threat(s) posed by a virus such as SARS-CoV-2, then yes, one could foolishly believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is "over” simply because some loudmouthed crusaders against public health, funded by sadistic billionaires, finally got their way because it was politically convenient to wealthy interests…such as the Koch oil dynasty. Oops.
However, this sort of hubris reserved for homo-sapiens fails to account for scientific reality: that millions of Americans, including countless children, have been disabled or harmed by "mild" COVID-19 reinfections. As our current strategy of mass, repeated infection continues into the immediate future, millions more Americans are likely to join the ranks of the Long COVID disabled. From a sheerly political and economic analysis, this leaves our nation's workforce in a much weaker state, and our standing in the global economy in a much frailer position. It’s clear that Jay Bhattacharya, an alleged “health economist,” possesses very poor economic thinking.
Failed Strategy #3: Saturation
Another stage of pandemic mismanagement is the delusion that there is a net positive to be gained from saturating the population with the SARS-CoV-2 virus - a highly unscientific "Wildfire Dogma" that believes rapidly infecting an unvaccinated "low-risk" population with a rapidly evolving SARS virus will quickly establish a post-pandemic state of "herd immunity," aka the unscientific theory of the Great Barrington Declaration - propped up by right-wing billionaires.
Those that survived their initial bout with COVID-19 were mistakenly thought to be protected from all future potential harms from the virus. Unfortunately, we have seen people disabled and left unable to work after repeated infections, with many unable to continue their careers and denied the disability support they're rightfully entitled to. Part of this is due to a failed strategy of population-wide viral saturation, which allows the virus new opportunities to mutate and evolve to become immune resistant, undercutting the effectiveness of the current SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
The consequences of nakedly embracing such a virus and rejecting preventive science & engineering will spell out disaster for many in the long run. What this does manage to accomplish, however, is liberating the government from its basic responsibilities in responding to a national disaster, and further empowering the libertarian anti-vax crusade to abolish public health and the larger regulatory state. On top of all this, wealthy interests will continue to profit from a rising tide of population-wide illness, especially in children. (PAI)
Are We Still in the COVID-19 Pandemic?
Just a reminder that the following are unprecedented in all of human history and pre-history:
* 8 billion hosts.
* Global travel.
* Older population thanks to long lifespans.
* Repeated infections up to several times per year.
* Extremely dense populations, mostly indoors.
Like it or not, but the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is the first of its kind in many ways: the first global pandemic with high-speed air travel, as well as the first pandemic with an anti-vax movement empowered by global social media - just for starters. It's also the first in which the "solution" is to simply roll over and surrender to repeated infections, multiple times a year, with a virus that has already disabled millions of Americans. If an American child began the 1st grade in 2021, they will have been subjected to anywhere from a dozen to potentially two dozen bouts with COVID-19 before graduating high school - a totally unprecedented situation that none of the talking heads in public health have been brave enough to admit is a radically new predicament for pediatric health and development.
The Biden Administration's present COVID-19 pandemic management strategy is essentially letting a man, who knows none of the rules to a single casino game, cash out your child's college fund and then run wild at Caesar's Palace, only to convince himself that he's winning because the dealer keeps handing him a fresh hand of cards.
As the virus continues to infect and re-infect the population, the cumulative damage will continue to build over time, and the population of those disabled by Long COVID will continue to grow, possibly exponentially as a consequence of so many population-wide reinfection cycles. Many of those most susceptible to death from the SARS-CoV-2 virus have already died in recent years. The primary threat to the “general population” (non-disabled, non-elderly, etc.) remains the threat of organ damage and disability caused by repeated COVID-19 infections, including cognitive and neurological impairment, heart damage, and even erectile dysfunction.
So yes, the grim reality is that if nothing changes, the delusional "Wildfire Dogma" has already failed, and we face a potentially unending "Forever Pandemic" by refusing to mitigate and prevent future SARS-CoV-2 infections with the multiple forms of science-based interventions available. Sadly, the pampered Paid Opinion Haver pundit class, largely thoughtless and entirely detached from the reality of working Americans, has already done their best to discipline the public into rolling over and accepting this fate. We are likely facing a grim future with a population health that is much weaker, with working Americans in a much more precarious and vulnerable position than before, and the potential for a rising tide of pestilence caused by ruthless deregulation and climate collapse to drown us all before the century's end.
Doing the Work of Ending the Pandemic
If you're subscribed to a false binary that only a surge of immediate deaths can represent the beginning and end of a pandemic, then sure, you can twist yourself into believing that the COVID-19 pandemic is "over." You would be woefully ignorant of the reality of the many harms this virus can cause, and the sheer scale of people it is negatively affecting - and by 2030, our future understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus will likely show that any mass infection strategy was the equivalent of societal cyanide and totally self-defeating. This leaves a great deal of work to be done.
Without better vaccines and treatments, and without a cure for Long COVID, we're simply left with one objective left until that time is realized: to reduce transmission. Removing SARS-CoV-2 from the air and preventing individuals from breathing it in. Luckily, we have many proven engineering solutions that work, including respirators, HEPA filtration, ventilation improvements, and even seemingly futuristic Far-UVC lightning. (Cyber Night-Market)
The Biden Administration had a prime opportunity in the early half of 2021 to seize upon their mandate to "follow the science" as promised, and actually initiate some of what their own 2020 election campaign platform proposed, but quickly threw out in order to construct an artificial finish line and lull the American people into a false sense of "normalcy" - full of constant illness, a surge of disability, and needless suffering - with children, who have no voice politically, bearing the largest burden of all. This was demanded by wealthy interests, channeled via Biden’s current Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients, who personally oversaw Rochelle Walensky's replacement: Mandy Cohen. It's worth nothing that both Zients and Cohen have direct ties to companies guilty (American Prospect) of Medicare fraud (KFF Health News).
What needed to happen in the spring of 2021 was a massive expansion of the Defense Production Act beyond a singular vaccine-only approach doomed to fail - mirroring the domestic response to the Second World War - to rapidly produce all of these tools, deploy them in essential public spaces such as hospitals and schools, and create sustainable new careers in engineering and public health, for starters. For America to set a new technologically advanced standard for public health that the rest of the globe would follow, instead of the rest of the globe foolishly following America into a failed doctrine of viral saturation.
The beauty of understanding how we're getting everything wrong today, is that we can begin to start doing the right thing tomorrow.
While the Democrat Party may have chosen to abandon its responsibility to the public, and the Republican Party's crusade against any federal regulatory authority whatsoever continues to gain steam, the American citizen still retains a personal responsibility to safeguard their fellow countryman’s health. Some of us have taken it upon ourselves to erect a sort of guerilla public health - building our own media such as The Sick Times, building our own organizations (COVID Action Map), refuting anti-vax propaganda (Science-Based Medicine), providing mutual aid, and building the necessary disaster response that was supposed to remain the responsibility of our federal government under Biden.
…So When Does the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic End?
To finally answer the title of this article, the American public has to accept a harsh reality, one that was Biden’s responsibility to inform the public of when he took office in January 2021. To entertain a little “fantasy football” for a moment, here is what Biden should have said when he was sworn into office, and committed to:
Many of you are asking, when will the coronavirus pandemic end? A responsible answer is rarely the easy one. On average, pandemics last for around five years. Hence, we are in for a long, multi-year battle against this deadly virus alongside the rest of the world.
We won’t truly know that the COVID-19 pandemic is over until a good amount of time after we have truly crossed that rubicon, and constructing artificial finish lines to justify dropping precautions, or embracing thoughtless approaches like the mass infection of unvaccinated children, will only drag this pandemic out even further - with many Americans paying a horrible price for our greed and arrogance.
The American people should also know that bad actors, empowered by wealthy interests with a nefarious agenda, will do everything in their power to sabotage and compromise a coordinated, sustainable COVID-19 pandemic response, including everything from outright lying to threats of violence. Vigilance against anti-vaxxers and other crusaders against public health will be tantamount, and we will not abandon our frontline heroes.
There is no “one-quick-fix” to the COVID-19 pandemic. Every tool must be used in combination to mitigate the harms of this new virus, instead of a dangerous “InfinityCOVID” radicalism that goes against centuries of medical science and public health. Scientific knowledge, especially in regard to new viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, can take years to develop. Falsely assuming that every child who doesn’t immediately drop dead from COVID-19 is fully recovered from an acute viral infection is a reckless, selfish delusion that unfairly gambles with the future of our children.
Only by working together and setting an example for the rest of the world to follow, can we lead and do the hard work that will bring the COVID-19 pandemic to an end. You elected me to accomplish this task, and I won’t lie to you: it will be incredibly challenging. However, you deserve an Administration that isn’t hooked on false platitudes and delusional optimism, but instead rooted in scientific fact and basic empathy.
Instead, the Biden Administration chose to listen to completely unscientific political consultants (House.gov) in a misguided belief that abandoning COVID-19 mitigations would transfer into meaningful electoral success. How is that working out, again?
Oops. With the likelihood of a second Trump Presidential term almost all but certain, and a bloodthirsty crusade against vaccines, regulatory authority, and the very ideal of public health waiting to strike, we have all become public health guerillas enlisted in a potential COVID-19/H5N1 dual pandemic - one in which the dominant thinking will be that it’s acceptable to co-infect America’s kids with both viruses simultaneously.
Ancient mythology commonly refers to Pestilence as one of great destroyers of civilizations; a lesson to be passed down from generation to generation via spoken word. Only a foolish man who refuses to learn from their ancestors would even begin to dare embracing it - and yet, here we are in America, with all of the most incredible modern technologies in reach, stumbling into doing that exact thing.
None of us should accept this outcome. The COVID-19 pandemic ends when we remove the potential of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to significantly harm us, and unfortunately, that risk is still on the table. Thus, our fight to protect one another’s health will continue, with or without the approval of the government.
