Who's afraid of Omicron?
It appears Covid-19 has now mutated back into, like its cousins, an irritating, not-at-all scary bug
So, you got a cold. It happens around this time every year, to almost everyone. You got the sniffles, your head is a little foggy, you have an occasional sneeze, there’s some persistent phlegm lingering in the back of your throat. It’s mildly annoying, and you’re reminded this is bound to happen at least once every winter, and life goes on as normal but with a few more tissues in your pocket. Give it three days, a week max. Maybe you take some over-the-counter medicine, have chicken soup for lunch, sleep next to a humidifier. Upon greeting friends or coworkers, you politely decline a handshake or hug. “Sorry, I’ve got a cold,” you tell them — and they appreciate your consideration. “Oh, I just got over that,” one might say, “something’s going around.” No one panics, no one cares, you’re still invited to the party, you can still go to dinner, you still go to the office.
That’s Omicron. To date, one person in the US has died with Omicron — though, as with the flu during the winter months, that number will rise over the coming weeks. Note, that’s with Omicron, not from. “With” not “from” is how the germ fetishists in media, government and medicine came up with that apocalyptic number of 800,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US, reached this month. That number means nothing to anyone who’s been following the science, and is critical of the news. We knew back in 2020 that Covid-19 was about as lethal as a particularly nasty strain of flu, albeit this one was made by the Chinese in a lab, and the actual death toll was probably around 100,000, also on par with a very bad flu season.
The common cold is a coronavirus, and it appears Covid-19 has now mutated back into, like its cousins, an irritating, not-at-all scary bug. Yes, for a small number, Omicron may prove fatal — but deadlier than the flu? So far, the evidence suggests that’s unlikely. Variants were always going to be less deadly and more contagious — that’s how viruses survive. If you’re a virus and you’re too deadly, and kill all your hosts, you die too.
Omicron is the inevitable, wonderful news and should be cause for celebration and relief. Instead, we are seeing the opposite. The media has ramped up the fear porn. Omicron is now “surging!”, liberals are threatening more lockdowns and those who’ve refused to get the clot, sorry, shot, are now a greater danger than ever before, according to those in power.
This, over a runny nose. “I guess I have Covid,” a friend texted me. He had to get mandatorily tested at work. “I have a runny nose. I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. I’ve received a handful of messages like that. And, of course, all these “breakthrough” cases of celebrities and politicians who got the shot, sometimes three times, are all “very mild,” we’re told.
They, too, have the sniffles, perhaps a tickle in the throat, and nothing else. That’s all you need to know to understand that very little about the response to the pandemic has been about public health — and entirely about politics, money and power. For some time now I figured we should just start having Covid orgies, like the adult version of a chicken pox party. The shot clearly isn’t preventing infection. So, if a friend tests positive, everyone meets at his place to lick the doorknobs, rub your face all over the toilet seat and spit in each other’s mouths. It’s really the most patriotic thing to do. Protect and isolate the fats and the olds, but for the rest of us, the sooner we get it and get over it, the quicker we can move on and retake power from the incompetent, confused, flip-flopping rubes who’ve controlled our lives for the past two years.
But, with Omicron, we don’t need a sex party, or the shot, to get the nation moving again. Everyone’s going to get the Chinese Cyborg Sniffles anyway, so just carry on as usual, as you normally would with a normal coronavirus. Of course, the worst thing you can do is get tested. Since President Biden and his ilk are looking to point fingers at fellow Americans for prolonging the pandemic, why not place the blame squarely where it belongs — on anyone who’s getting a Covid test? They’re the real reason we remain in this mess. We should be protesting outside testing sites and throwing tomatoes at anyone waiting in line. They are agents of lockdown, harbingers of a stagnant economy, enemies of freedom, useful, zombified idiots. Those are the real brownshirts, in those lines twisted around city blocks — and they don’t even know it, or care.
After all, what do you hope to accomplish by finding out your sneeze was the dreaded Omicron, aside from aiding tyranny? There’s no treatment. Nothing changes for you. And, if the knowledge of having Omicron means you can now self-isolate to protect your fellow man, then, you better do that every time a cold comes around — because that’s all we’re dealing with and anything else makes you just a quarantine-trendster.
This year, rather than investing in Big Pharma, I’m putting my money in Campbell’s. And my Christmas wish is for all of America to get Omicron. Therefore, when their mild sore throat clears up after two days, and they compare notes with their friends instead of with their politicians, they might finally wake up and decide to take their country back.
The article originally appeared in The Spectator World in December 2021.