COVID-19: Who to Blame for the Latest Crisis

For the latter, it cited the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mid-November global Covid-19 death toll of 5.1 million but also warned that the WHO was concerned about underreporting of deaths in many countries. Other reliable assessments ranged from 12 to 17 million deaths.

The column predicted further problems due to low vaccination rates worldwide: “So Covid-19’s impact is far higher than what is commonly assumed, and there is still a long way to go. Global vaccination rates are hopelessly inadequate, yet very few governments have any clear vision for what is really needed.”

{Quite frankly, that last one is a moronic statement, generous at best. China lead the way to the perfect means to confront the virus. While the westernized governments attempted at first to hoard the development and rights to vaccinations as the US government was going abroad within tyrannical means stealing materials our capital system was short of due to its failures. Then when Cuba, Russia, and China were willing to work abroad to voluntarily distribute their vaccines they were suppressed while being demonized with only limited places allowing them in. It isn't a lack of vision, it's an act of criminality to benefit a capitalist system where the world citizenry is expendable.}

[consortiumnews.com]

{Since then, the pandemic has rapidly evolved yet again. Two aspects are most pressing: the new Omicron variant; and indications that vaccine nationalism is accelerating — just when the opposite is needed. Omicron has come out of the blue and is spreading rapidly less than a fortnight after South Africa announced its detection. It has already been detected in 24 countries, with more being added to the list every day.

While intensive work is going on to assess its infectivity, lethality and resistance to vaccines and antiviral drugs, there is little concrete information, partly explaining the sudden attempts of some countries to keep it out. The tentative results are mixed. Some data from South Africa, the worst affected country so far, show that it produces relatively mild symptoms, but this may be skewed by the fact that many of the first Omicron cases have been identified in younger individuals or detected in very recently screened travelers, so the impact on the elderly is unclear.}

In other words. What we hear from our governments and MSCM means absolutely nothing. The only thing of value you should take to mind is the quickly high rising numbers considering what it's going to do to local regions it effects. Which was referred to in the WSWS article.

{Early indications are that Omicron could be much more infectious than the previously dominant Delta. Based on the rise in Covid-19 cases and sequencing data, Tom Wenseleers, an evolutionary biologist at KU-Leuven in Belgium, has estimated that Omicron could infect three-to-six times as many people as Delta, over the same time period. “That’s a huge advantage for the virus — but not for us,” he said.

A more worrying indication is that Omicron is infecting people who have already had Covid-19. According to new evidence collected in South Africa by the country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), the latest epidemiological evidence suggests that Omicron can evade immunity from infection with earlier variants and is causing reinfections at three times previous rates.}

{This brings us to the second element of concern: the persistence of vaccine nationalism from wealthy countries protecting their own at the expense of the wider world.}

Quite frankly, that's another moronic statement. If 800,000 deaths compared to 5000 in a population vastly larger than ours is considered protection, then my idea of protection is so fucking wrong.