https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/21/biden-omicron-speech-covid-testing-hospitals/
"For the Democratic Party, Biden’s message indicates a shift away from being the party associated with strict covid mitigation measures as vaccines are widely available and proven to work against the latest variant [???]. The change comes just before the start of a midterm election year in which Democrats are expected to face an uphill struggle, and lawmakers and strategists have urged party leaders to put forth a new message on the pandemic."
Does this mean the US government will go easy on the voting public until after next November's elections? And only then will we get the Australia/Austria/Italy/Germany etc. treatment?
The WaPo did give a soft voice to the fact that all the carefully made plans for dealing with a pandemic have been trashed, in favor of methods designed to cement control of the population. Perhaps because Politico again showed us how CDC makes sure not to collect or share any of the data that are needed to deal with a pandemic.
Julia Raifman, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, said she was focused on what she said was Biden’s failure to deliver an earlier plan: the lengthy national pandemic strategy, released on the president’s first day in office, that promised to “guide America out of the worst public health crisis in a century.”
“That’s a very good plan that has everything that we need in it,” said Raifman, posting on Twitter a list of the plan’s promises, which included nationwide masking, better virus data and creating a sense of common purpose. “COVID leadership has not only not implemented it, they have directly controverted virtually every item,” she added on Twitter.
Not so fast: Here's the latest on the "Australia... treatment" as it stands in Queensland (one of the states with the most heavy-handed COVID restrictions):
ReplyDeleteHEADLINE: Queenslanders told spread of COVID strain of Omicron is 'necessary' — what does that mean?
[QUOTE]
Queensland's new Chief Health Officer John Gerrard has been telling people this week the spread of COVID-19 in the Sunshine State [that's Queensland's tagline] is not only inevitable — it's "necessary".
"In order for us to go from the pandemic phase to an endemic phase, the virus has to be widespread," Dr Gerrard said.
"We all have to have immunity [and] there's two ways you can do that – by being vaccinated or getting infected.
"Once we've done that, once the virus is spreading, once we all have some degree of immunity, the virus becomes endemic and that is what is going to happen."
...
Since Monday, daily case numbers have increased sevenfold, with yesterday's tally of 369 unheard of even during the 2020 height of the pandemic in Queensland. [Yes, that's right; mass hysteria over 369 positive tests in a 24-hour period, in a population of 5.2 million. In total, we've had 2,977 COVID cases in QLD since Jan 2020, with 7 COVID deaths.]
But with the majority of Queensland residents being fully vaccinated, Dr Gerrard has argued the goal has fundamentally shifted to taking the COVID-19 pandemic into an endemic phase.
Essentially that means the disease is so widespread that its patterns are predictable and circulation is typical within the population.
[END QUOTE]
The rest of the story can be found here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-24/qld-coronavirus-covid19-omicron-from-pandemic-to-endemic/100722924
The story is heavily weighted toward the effectiveness and advisability of vaccination. Still, can it be that we now have a sensible, pragmatic Chief Health Officer who is making sensible, science-based (that's regular science, small s, not the one with religious undertones and political biases, Science) decisions??
Perhaps he's just readying us for the inevitable failure of the COVID vaccines against the latest variant... Either way, we're officially moving into "living with it" mode. And that's a very good thing.