The Omicron variant of the Coronavirus was first blasted over the airwaves on Thanksgiving night, leading to an enormous plunge in markets all around the world on Black Friday. Oil was down 11%, the S&P 500 was down about 3%, and Bitcoin tumbled 10%. All “because of Omicron fears,” a term which still populates the headlines on CNBC and other market-focused websites on any down day. Lockdowns have been reinstated in Europe, Australia, and many other nations around the world. At no point during the pandemic have so many people tested positive for the virus.
All of this sounds pretty scary. Some might have you think we are going back to square one in our pandemic response. But a look under the hood shows a huge disconnect between what this variant is all about and how it’s being communicated. What we find in the data shines a bright light on both the challenges of a science-based approach to governing millions of human beings and the impossibly disgusting click-baiting our traditional media/social media clusterfuck will implement to earn advertising money, regardless of the facts of a situation. Sex sells, but so does fear. You’re fucked no matter which you buy.
We start with Omicron. As soon as the variant ambushed our Thanksgiving evenings, the fear-mongerers were everywhere. “Most contagious variant” and “back to square 1” were phrases we all saw in the recent weeks since it was announced. You probably have heard that word 2 million times this month if you’ve made the mistake of turning on the news.
Among those types of takes was a more level headed one which caught my eye. If Omicron is more contagious but less deadly than its predecessors, that could signal the beginning of the end of the pandemic status COVID has held since March 2020. The virus wants to live and reproduce, but it needs the host to be alive in order to do so. So the natural evolution of a virus is to become more contagious and less deadly, giving it more hosts to jump between.
I take a look at the news around Omicron and all I see is evidence that this endgame-type situation is in play. Cases are way up (we’ll get to that in a minute), but hospitalizations have not yet increased. Neither have deaths. Which is FANTASTIC! Should be shouted from the rooftops! Because not only is this happening, but vaccines are available to all Americans who want them. One might even suggest there’s nothing to worry about for anyone who doesn’t associate with the most vulnerable of people.
There are some articles such as this one by BBC that have crept into the mainstream which are informing the public of this exciting development. But these have been drowned out by the constant slew of takes around the “status of the pandemic,” as if things have not changed one bit. A return to the NBA bubble is being proposed by ESPN, Biden had to go public and say lockdowns will not be returning to the USA, and the fight to mandate the vaccine for private sector workers has reached the Supreme Court
To be clear, I know how impossibly hard it must be to be in Health Care right now. I feel horribly for anyone who has to spend their lives taking care of sick people during this era. My gripe is with what makes the cut in the national media, why, and what impact it has on we the people.
The job of these media outlets is to capture our attention, not to do their journalistic duty to the public. Looking at the articles above, MSNBC and CNBC are part of the Comcast portfolio of media assets, and CNN is part of AT&T (for now). Those are publicly traded conglomerates, led with board directors who are there to pilot their organizations in such a way that shareholder value is created. Attention captured = advertising money generated (loosely, but roll with me). Thus, everyone in the organization, from the marketing director to the underpaid copywriters, is thinking not about how to tell the best story, but how to get you to click on their content.
Omicron is therefore inconvenient for them. It’s potential to mark the virus’s official transition from pandemic to endemic is not good for long-term attention grabbing. They’re reliant on us to stay glued to COVID-focused content, rather than live our lives. Telling us we can relax and enjoy our lives again is going to lead to us putting the phone away or turning the TV off. Can’t have that. They’re going to milk this thing until the wheels fall off. Look at this article in Salon as an example (screenshot below)
How will we know when the wheels fall off if no one tells us? Who Watches the Watchmen, and all that. It’s not like there is a streaming service for it.
The larger point Omicron highlights is the impossibility of creating effective policy for hundreds of millions of people based on constantly morphing scientific evidence, and then enacting/enforcing it before the situation changes and a new policy is required. I highly recommend watching Adam Curtis’s 1992 series Pandora’s Box about the dangers of technocrats driven by the scientific method owning the levers of power. And he doesn’t even cover the risk-reward decision making that got the United States into the Vietnam War - my holy grail of what’s wrong with this approach to ruling.
Why criticize people thinking scientifically? Isn’t that how things should be done? In a vacuum, of course. But data-driven decision making is only effective if you have the right data. And we the people are currently living through a series of policies being passed with the wrong data in mind. Specifically, the number of positive tests.
The idea behind using tests to determine whether to lock down or enact restrictions on the public sounds good in a vacuum. If there’s a lot of COVID in your area, stay inside until it’s gone. Test before you go see people so you don’t get them sick should you have the plague. Everybody will get tested and will follow the policy because it makes sense.
Tough vaccine policies make sense too. The vaccine reduces the risk of needing hospitalization from COVID. Our health system cannot handle so many people having COVID at once, because beds are unavailable in hot spots which trickles down to people needing treatment for other conditions not receiving it. So therefore the vaccine must be administered to everyone, as the risk to the health system will decrease and the (blessed be they) medical professionals can get out of war mode. From the top of the system looking down as our leaders do, this is the only logical approach.
What Curtis contends, and what I now treat as gospel, is how downright impossible it is in a technocracy to factor in all of the data and not end up enacting a policy which does as much harm as good. When the virus swept the world, you could argue a temporary lockdown was the correct approach. We didn’t know how deadly it was, if it would turn us into zombies, etc. So giving the scientists time to determine the specifics and ultimately enact a sensible policy was fair.
But the scientists and us aren’t the only parties involved here. The politicians got involved and start name-calling in the media in advance of the election later that year, creating a situation which has culminated in the supporters of the President who facilitated Operation Warp Speed refusing to take the vaccine. The Federal Reserve enacted their own policies to further enrich their rich friends, I mean save the economy. Businesses shut down, laid off workers. Some figured out how to grow rapidly in this new stay-at-home environment, like Roku and Peloton (shout out to my favorite instructor Alex Toussaint). The Treasury and Congress had to bail out thousands of small, medium, and large businesses. They also determined they needed to provide stimulus directly to the public, which created an unnatural supply-demand imbalance that still has not resolved itself. As a result of all of this, inflation is going vertical with no end in sight, eroding the purchasing power of we the people (not to mention citizens of any country which does business in $USD)
By limiting the narrative to focus only words which come out of Anthony Fauci’s mouth and the evolution of the virus, the system can use the media to keep the wealthy and powerful people at the top of society who still buy their bullshit away from the absolute tragedy unfolding for the 99% in the USA. Those elite attention spans are the most valuable in the world, and so the comfortable narrative that the system and those that run it have “got this” must be preserved.
Do they got this though? Let’s use the two words of the day to analyze - Omicron and testing. Biden’s administration is providing free testing all over the place, and is looking to fund the development of more tests by giving contracts to corporations which will produce tests. Once enough tests are available to a region, the number of positive tests will then be used by local, state, and federal governments around the world to determine policy.
It took a lot of work for the technocrats to maneuver the system to get us to this point. There was no virus testing infrastructure when COVID began - much of it was built from scratch and at great cost. All of the time and money spent on this has thus far not been sufficient to provide testing for every single American citizen, which is what would be needed to acquire all of the data required to make informed decisions. People across the country are waiting hours in line to get tested at a testing facility and pharmacies are essentially out of rapid tests. Places like New York City, where every citizen wants to get tested, are still begging for federal support in providing tests. The Federal Government is full steam ahead in working with corporate America to provide enough tests for everyone. The Army is involved in testing sites.
Problem is, the science that initially provided rationale for this testing system is now ancient history given what we know about the Omicron variant. Remember, we needed to know who had COVID so our medical system would not be overwhelmed with dying patients. Additionally, by knowing who has COVID and who does not, local and state governments can determine their COVID policy in order to avoid outbreaks of dying people in their principalities.
Omicron appears to thumb its nose at these types of policies. If people are not going to require as much hospitalization as before, then the need for everyone to get tested is less important to society. It’s certainly not MORE important, but based on the way Biden, Fauci, and the other powers that be are communicating, you’d think your life is still on the line if you come in contact with an Omicron-positive individual. Get that test, get that vaccine, or else you’re a bad person not doing your duty as a citizen.
Stating the obvious, the Democrats need to get elected by the people in order to remain in power. People have been absolutely miserable living through this pandemic. The Democrats ran the Biden campaign largely on how poorly the Trump administration handled COVID. He certainly made his mistakes during the pandemic, namely causing an irreparable distrust in the scientific establishment amongst his supporters. The Democrats pointed out how terrible this was, and it certainly helped them convince otherwise apathetic voters to get their butts to the polls.
They promised they would do better than Trump did. That promise helped them win the election. But here we are almost a year into Biden’s term, and look at this fucking mess. The mess itself is not surprising, but the denial of how messy the mess really is continues to shock.
The “unvaccinated” American citizens are blamed by the establishment as the entire reason for why the plan is not working. If only they were vaccinated and not SO STUPID, everything would be fine. But they are so selfish, so stupid, and so evil that your lives remain miserable. Let’s ignore how every single variant of this virus has been discovered outside the United States, how there are legitimate concerns with the side effects of the vaccine, and how many people outside of the US remain unvaccinated. Blame your fellow citizens, not us. Just follow this very simple six-pronged plan put out by the Biden White House.
The Democrats and their allies in the corporate world who benefit from their approach to government cannot have the people seeing this situation for the clusterfuck that it is. And so the usual tactics are employed - throwing unlimited information at us, combining speculation with truth, using slivers of scientific data to promote the agenda, and ending with a “trust the authorities” type message that makes any opposing perspective look ridiculous. Ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears and do your duty as a member of the system. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
While the technocrats have been playing a real life version of the board game Pandemic, the quality of life as a citizen in this country has plummeted. Biden’s approval rating sits at a horrendous 28%. Inflation is rampant due to actions taken by the Fed and the Federal Government during the COVID era, and most citizens don’t feel a shred represented by Congress. Nobody has our backs or has our interests top of mind. Listen to Nancy Pelosi below give her thoughts on the obvious moral hazard of members of Congress trading stock options in violation of the law ( - starts at 3:10). There could not be a bigger disconnect between us and them.
But we are not just pieces in a board game, or numbers in a computer. We are not robots who will always comply with the scientific evidence regardless of how many times it changes. We love, we want to have fun, we have feelings. Many of us would be willing to work hard for our country if only we believed in it. We deserve to be given all perspectives, to have leaders that treat us with respect and speak to us like we aren’t fools.
Omicron is a particularly useful lens into how all of these factors come together to paint the bizarre picture being shown to we the people. It’s not a black and white situation, no heroes or villains. Just too many actors all pushing their own agendas in levels of the system that we are not privy to.
Yours truly,
Mr. Monopoly