And It's Another New Year!

Happy New Year to you all! My thoughts on the year that will pass away in a couple of hours are pretty much the same as my thoughts on the year that preceded it: goodbye, and good riddance!

I had high hopes for 2021. The Wuhan flu vaccines were brought to market just after the November elections, and I was pretty sure that would cure all my problems. Enough people would be vaccinated, and the world would return to normal. Boy, was I wrong.

I debated with myself about getting the jab. My health is good, and in all my years I've never taken a flu shot. It has been almost 40 years since I had a case of the flu. My immune system seems to be up to snuff, which is probably one of only two advantages to spending 10 years of my life as a road warrior. (The other is lifetime Medallion status with Delta Air Lines, a consequence of flying one million air miles with them in a span of 10 years.) Plus, at the beginning of the year, vaccines were scarce, and there were older people in poor health who needed the jab more than I did.

In the end, I decided that it was worth a couple of shots for life to return to normal. By the end of March I had received the jabs, and was waiting for a return to normalcy.

We finished the school year under masking and social distancing requirements. Fortunately, graduation last May was a maskless affair, with the promise that the new school year would be normal.

About a week before our pre-school-year work days, I received the email that ruined my year: we would have to wear those ineffective and useless masks. Fortunately, social distancing, while required, was pretty much observed in the breach.

Why do I hate the masks so much, aside from the fact that they are useless? I am partially deaf, and have gotten along for years by lip-reading. I cannot do that with the idiotic masks on my students. Plus, the damned things fog my glasses, and get to be pretty irritating by lunch time as my beard stubble starts to appear. And of course, the most irritating thing of all is that for the last 18 months or so, the only place I have worn the mask is at the school. We follow whatever the CDC says, which I believe is a colossal mistake. But the vast majority of my life these past 18 months or so have been maskless, and yet here I am.

Things got worse. Whereas last school year we were allowed to take the masks off when out of doors, a little in to the school year we were informed that we had to wear the masks out of doors. We follow the CDC. The question is, do they follow the science?

Hoping against hope that the booster would help the world return to normal, I took the third jab. That was a complete waste of time.

The latest variant, Omicron, is spreading like wildfire. It is killing next to no one. Two days ago Bloomberg News had the following headline: "US Covid Deaths Are Falling As Omicron Cases Surge". That really didn't answer my question, which was how many deaths from the Omicron variant have we seen in the U.S. It took awhile to find the answer. It is almost as if no one wants to publish the figure. The figure I have is through Christmas Eve, and that figure is ONE: A Harris County, Texas man who, they helpfully tell us, was unvaccinated.

This is what an intelligent biological scientist would have predicted. Darwin's survival of the fittest is at work here. The Omicron variant spreads rapidly but is not as likely to kill off its host as the other variants. Both these mutations help its survival. And its rapid spread seems to be crowding out the Delta variant.

I have two points to make, then I will leave you to your celebrations. The "vaccines" are not vaccines in the traditional sense of that word. When I received the Salk vaccine, life returned to normal. No more mid-day naps, which were thought to protect against polio, and likewise no restrictions on swimming at a public pool, which also was thought at the time to be a breeding ground for the polio virus. And as far as I know, excluding the disastrous batch of vaccine made by Cutter Labs on the west coast, no one who had the vaccine ever caught polio. (Some 40,000 cases of polio occurred because Cutter Labs failed to inactivate the virus properly.) That cannot be said of the current "vaccine". I heard the Vice President on a video clip the other day, and at first I thought she misspoke. But she repeated this at least twice: everyone she knew who caught the Wuhan flu had been vaccinated. That is less like a vaccine and more like our traditional flu shots. It is a roll of the dice with a flu shot, and some years as many as 60% of those who received the shot still catch the influenza. So, I suggest we stop calling this a vaccine, and call it what it really is: a flu shot.

Point two: the relative ineffectiveness of the vaccine against these recent variants, and the evolution of the virus to a highly transmissible but less deadly strain, means the pandemic is over. It is now endemic, meaning it will be with us forever, like the swine flu, the Spanish flu, the Hong Kong flu, and all the others. Which means that it is time for us to return to normal life and quit hectoring our fellow humans who choose not to get the jab, or to wear a mask, or to wash hands as if suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. We are going to be living with the Wuhan flu forever more, so get used to it.

I wonder how many years it will take the CDC to reach that obvious conclusion?