Max Boot
appears on CNN to say that we have seen the light at the end of COVID’s dark tunnel. But the light turns out to be the headlamp of a train roaring forward to overwhelm us. The name of this train is the Omicron Variant of Covid.
Max Boot is a purported export on military affairs who parleyed his hatred of Donald Trump into a CNN consultant spot. His qualifications to discuss epidemiology are questionable. But, then, we live in the Land of the Free and Opinionated.
Mr. Boot has a bald head and a mild expression and he wears little round spectacles. He looks like a small-town president of the local Chamber of Commerce and talks that way as well. His words come simpering and mincing out of his lips, a parade of toy soldiers.
An inflamed basketball studded with fearsome prongs
represents the Omicron variant on TV news shows. The picture isn’t much different from the original image of the novel Covid virus, also spherical, encrusted with a swollen surface, and sporting dozens of stubby horns. But the Omicron is a very different kind of Covid mutation, one characterized by 30 mutations in its prongs. (These prongs are the plugs that fit into the sockets in our cells, binding the illness-producing virus to those cells and, thereby, sickening us. Antibodies are imagined as bluish shields, a bit like the child-protection inserts that can be plugged into electrical sockets to keep small children from stabbing their fingers into those outlets.) With more and different prongs, the virus can be thought of having more keys on its keychain and, therefore, more access to the closed and locked doors in our body. Once the thing opens the door and gets inside who knows what mayhem will ensue?
There is a very lucid short video (about eight minutes) produced by the Wall Street Journal that explores the physiognomy of the Omicron variant. A friend of mine, who has been a skeptic about Covid, tells me that the tone of the video is arrogant, informed with the sort of specious knowingness that characterizes liberal East Coast journalists. “She is pretending to know what she does not know,” my friend writes to me in an email. But it’s in the eye of the beholder. To my mind, her video is the best short scientific explanation of the new variant that I have seen.
My friend may be confused. I think he is objecting to the information that she presents – that is, another bout with this miserable disease, another surge, more hospitalizations and more deaths. I think my friend has mistaken his own dismay for the lucid certainties which the journalist presents. Like many people, he believes Covid is the hand of evolution striking down those who are unsuited to survive in the fierce competition of life. Everyone believes this notion on some level – at least, until they get sick or someone close to them dies or becomes very ill.
No one knows
why Omicron exists or where it came from. Some people think the virus gestated for six months in the body of someone with a compromised immune system, possibly a person suffering from AIDS in South Africa. Others believe the viral variant is zoonoetic – that is, the virus jumped from humans into some animal, mutated in that creature or creatures (bats? pangolins? macaques?) and, then, clawed its way back into the human race. Others think that the virus is just assiduously adapting to human defenses in the form of our vaccines. I suppose there are some who think the virus is part of the witches’ brew in the same secret military laboratory that fomented COVID in the first place. Possibly, it was invented by big Pharma to sell more vaccine.
In any event, it is known that Omicron is much more transmissible than Delta which, in turn, was much more infectious than the original COVID virus. It also seems that this variant virus, demonstrating its own peculiar cunning, is less virulent and less likely to lead to hospitalization. This means that the virus has contrived a way to spread through asymptomatic transmission. People are walking around everywhere with the disease concealed within them. But it remains to be seen how devastating this next surge of Covid will be – Omicron is new: it was only discovered in the last week of November. We are now one month into the new variant’s propagation.
Joe Biden
seems to be completely baffled by challenges posed by the Omicron variant. Consensus scientific opinion is that the virus will now spread through Omicron and become virtually ubiquitous. Since many people (perhaps most) will be asymptomatic, testing is the key to tracking, and controlling, the spread of the virus. This has always been the case but the United States has lagged seriously behind the rest of the developed world with respect to our capacity to test for Coronavirus. Biden has been criticized for not invoking the Military Preparedness Act to commandeer pharmaceutical factories and retrofit them to produce more test kits. The President promises a half-billion test kits by mid-January. But this measure is obviously too little too late. Millions of people are traveling for the Holidays and they will contract the virus and drag it home with them to every nook and cranny from sea to shining sea. Testing will slam the pasture gate shut about two weeks after all the cows have escaped. Of course, the courageous and scientifically valid approach to the Omicron virus would be to discourage all Christmas travel until more is known about this variant. But the President doesn’t have the political will (or capital for that matter) to act courageously. He dithers about his response but refuses to use the bully pulpit to bend public opinion so as to discourage holiday travel. So the airports are full of lines of people, probably about ten percent of them, carrying Covid among their Christmas gifts to their destinations.
Biden is interviewed, “one-to-one” as the media likes to say, by a journalist with questions about his management of the Covid epidemic. The journalist isn’t really hostile and lobs a few softballs at Biden – easy pitches that he should bang out of the park: “Is the fact that people can’t acquire cheap COVID tests a failure of your administration?” the journalist asks. “It wasn’t foreseeable,” Biden says. Then, he inexplicably alters course: “Well, some may argue that it was foreseeable two weeks ago or a month or six months ago...” This is a preface to the “but” clause – “but they were wrong.” Except that Biden loses his way and doesn’t refute the notion that he could have foreseen the need for more tests six months ago. He appears to be confused. And, in fact, now, perhaps, he’s adopting his own counter-factual rhetoric as true. The way he responds doesn’t refute what “some may argue” and so, perhaps, he is conceding that he should have known earlier about the enhanced need to tests before the 2021 Holiday Season.
And it gets worse when things take a turn to the bizarre. Biden decides to pivot on his accomplishment, that is, tout the half-billion tests that his administration will make available in January. So he says: “And I’ve arranged for a half-billion pills, a half-billion to be available in the next few days...” he pauses. “There will be a half-billion pills for the American people...oh, I mean tests... for the people.” (Biden is confusing his tests for Covid infection with anti-viral post-infection palliative therapy, pills that you take to moderate the symptoms of the disease – this remedy was just approved by the FDA a day or so before the interview.) The interviewer is willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt for misspeaking. He asks something about whether the need for tests was foreseeable. Biden responds: “No one saw this coming but I’ve got 500,000 pills on the way for the American people.”
It’s pretty clear that Biden is uncertain as to what he has accomplished: is he filling prescriptions with a half-billion pills or has he arranged for the dissemination of the same number of Covid tests? The media seizes on this interview. Of course, the media’s bias is to favor Joe Biden if this is plausibly possible. But this clip is too good to be ignored. The fragment of the interview can be played without comment, ostensibly on the subject of the administration’s response to the Omicron crisis. But, there’s a side perk – the clip seems to show the President confused about just exactly what he has done and, at minimum, gravely disengaged from the crisis that he is supposed to be managing. (No one else in the public arena keeps mistaking tests for pills.) The media’s knee-jerk reaction is to subvert anyone in power and, so, the clip has a particular sinister efficacy – it can be shown without remarking upon Biden’s apparent confusion, while still making that point implicitly. And, the clip can be displayed to Biden’s shills in the chattering class of left-wing pundits so that they can vigorously defend the President.
In fact, the clip is shown to David Axelrod, a Democratic pro-Biden commentator. He doesn’t mention the President’s inability to keep clear in his mind the distinction between tests and pills, two completely different responses to the virus. He simply asserts that Biden’s encouragement of the tests is a good thing and that we are far “ahead of where we were last March.” (Fatigued by the endless pandemic, most people would not agree that we are “far ahead” of last March’s surge. Objectively, the statement is true – in March 2021, there were no vaccines widely available – but subjectively, as far as most people experience the Covid crisis, Axelrod’s assertion is simply tone-deaf.) Two other pundits take the same tack: they praise Biden for getting the tests available to the public, ignore the fact that this testing will come two weeks late to prevent holiday transmission of the virus, and act as if they didn’t hear the President confusing pills with tests. These are pundits who wrote books literally accusing Trump of murder for his response to the Covid virus when he was in office. Biden has no idea what to do and seems committed to a disastrous course of encouraging holiday travel. But he gets a pass notwithstanding clear evidence that he doesn’t understand his own response to Omicron variant and its probable catastrophic spread.
This latter point is significant. Trump was abused for objecting to shut-downs of schools and businesses during the height of the virus (and before vaccines) in the early Spring of 2020. But Biden is following the same course – he has appeared on TV encouraging Holiday travel when, in fact, everyone concedes that this will result in calamitous spread of the disease. The reason that a President should discourage Holiday travel in these circumstances can be simply, if cynically, stated: people need cover to avoid family gatherings. Many are pressured into traveling cross-country to commune with relatives whom they don’t particularly like and whom they avoid for the rest of the year. The Holidays enforce this debt to family that, in our modern world, a lot of people don’t particularly enjoy paying. If the President were to have the gumption to discourage holiday travel, this would provide an excuse, or “cover” as I have said, for those who are afraid to travel because of the virus or for other reasons. But, instead, the President has taken the exact opposite course – and this is in the context of more lock-downs in Europe where already Omicron is devouring the population.
Bill Gates knows better
when it comes to the virus. In view of the President’s default on this issue, Bill Gates, who is nothing if not well-informed, says that he is canceling most of his Holiday plans. He sends a tweet or an email to the world indicating that he doesn’t intend to travel for Christmas. Obviously, he disagrees with Biden’s bizarre stance of encouraging people likely to become infected to spread their disease all across America.
Of course, the Republicans are notably silent on all of these issues. They can’t denounce Joe Biden for his fecklessness with respect to responding to a disease that many are on record as regarding as fraudulent and a hoax. So the GOP, handed an issue with which to batter Biden on a silver platter, as it were, is powerless to act. How can they accuse Biden of not taking appropriate measures to combat the plague, when they argued that there is no plague at all?
The world has gone mad
and evidence for this is a strange story coming from India, the fons et origo of many strange stories. In a village somewhere, a pack of dogs killed a baby macaque, a sort of aggressive and cunning monkey. The monkeys were outraged and they began to kidnap dogs, drag them onto the roofs of houses, and, then, pitch them headlong into the street below. More than 250 dogs are said to have perished in this bizarre war between canines and monkeys. Later, the story is amended to suggest that the monkeys were kidnaping puppies out of some sort of misplaced solicitude, hauling the cowering baby dogs into trees and atop houses and, then, negligently allowing them to plummet to their death. This weird tale spreads like a virus over the internet but without any real details to support checking these allegations. It’s just another baffling event in some nameless village in some nameless wilderness in India.
A couple of fat Indian cops in opera bouffe uniforms gesture at a small corpse resting on a sheet atop a table. The corpse, they assert, is the petrified remains of a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex, retrieved from some cave or cranny in the Himalayan massif. The camera peers at the mummy. It’s obviously a shriveled dead cat with a lizard’s tail affixed improbably to its feline hind quarters. The policemen say that the dead cat proves that T. Rex still stalks the remote glaciers and rhododendron thickets of the high mountains. This story is aired on the laughably fraudulent Strange Evidence series, a TV show that features supposedly inexplicable footage on which so-called experts comment. (The experts are a rogue’s gallery of young actors identified with labels such as “Science Journalist,” “Military Expert,” and “Freelance Archaeologist”.) This is one of my favorite shows because of its bizarre video clips and the utterly obtuse and idiotic commentary provided by the self-proclaimed experts, often opining in fields very remote from their alleged expertise (fictional in any event I suppose). For instance, a pretty and earnest girl identified as “Entomologist” studies the images of the dead cat on her lap top. She says something like: “If this is an example of what’s running around in the Himalayas, I think I’m staying away.” But what is running around in the Himalayas is obviously feline and, apparently, a domestic house cat. One of experts, I think an “Internet Scientist”, tips her hand by saying: “This isn’t the normal thing that the cat drags in.” She also gazes at the petrified cat. “Holy Cow!” she says, also, I think a jab at the plump Hindu cop-dumplings: “It looks like a dinosaur!”
A pundit named Ezekiel Emmanuel
is asked to opine as to Biden’s failure to get testing kits available for the public before the Holidays. He’s shown the clip in which the President repeatedly confuses pills with tests. He doesn’t comment on that confusion. Clearly, he wants to say that Biden has, so to speak, fucked the pooch here, but this would not earn him any plaudits on CNN. So he says: “Testing has been problematic from the start. In the previous administration, testing wasn’t emphasized and, it seems... that this has been extended...”
“Extended” – that is, Biden has adopted Trump’s failure to encourage prompt and accurate testing for the virus. But the guy can’t bring himself to actually use Biden’s name.
Another prehistoric creature,
a baby dinosaur, is discovered curled up in a fossilized egg. The egg has been neatly split apart to show the little monster tightly embraced in a loop of its own bony tail. The fossilized fetus looks something like a miniature version of the creature in Alien, all jaw, claw, and prehensile tail. The TV hosts on CNN coo and giggle about the baby dinosaur. It’s as if they think it’s cute. To me, the petrified fossil, which looks a bit like the withered mummy of a cat, is horrifying. It’s a harbinger of our future quarried from the remotest past, a monstrous sign of things to come.
December 23, 2021
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