True Left

The Biden administration has officially given up at halting the pandemic:

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will, ultimately, find just about everybody,” Fauci told the Center for Strategic and International Studies during a “fireside chat.”

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/589344-fauci-omicron-will-infect-just-about-everybody

This means that the only way the pandemic will end is by democratic nations achieving herd immunity. (Even competent governments like China are not safe, because the virus can constantly be re-transmitted into their nation as long as a reservoir remains in dysfunctional Western nations!) Since individuals can catch Covid again within as little as 3 months, this means herd immunity will be impossible without wide-spread vaccination. Relying on a population of vaccinated people + people with "natural immunity" is not enough, since the "natural immunity" people will constantly be reinfected like a game of musical chairs as waves of the virus spread throughout each nation.

So, from a public health perspective, we are completely f*cked, and have to handle this on an individual level.


I would recommend that everyone here get the vaccine. Regarding the ethical considerations, sometimes we have to make compromises on our journey if we are ever to make it to the ultimate goal. If we are too inflexible, we risk being cut down before even coming close to accomplishing anything, thereby allowing evil to continue just because we were too stubborn to pick our minor battles.

Even if the vaccine cannot 100% prevent transmission of the virus, all evidence shows that it nearly eliminates the risk of death and hospitalization for individuals who are infected with "breakthrough" cases. As individuals, we are of no use to social justice activism if we die coughing up foamy saliva from a stupid virus. This is not the hill to die on.

If we manage to survive the pandemic, the reduction of exploitation that our actions will be able to achieve will drastically outweigh the potential unethicalness of partaking in a small vaccine that billions of people have already taken. (If it makes you feel any better, governments are over-producing the amount of vaccines, since they can't be stored forever, and you are not contributing to additional "demand" for the vaccine, since they are being over-produced whether you sign up to get one or not.)


Omicron is so insanely infectious that it does seem likely that nearly everyone will get exposed to it (even those of us who have managed to avoid contracting Covid thus far). The media is reporting it is less dangerous to the body than previous strains, but I think this is partially propaganda to keep the public from panicking. (The hospitals in the US and other nations are about ready to collapse, since the daily peak of infections for omicron in the US is like 4-5x greater than the delta wave where numerous hospitals throughout the nation were at 100% capacity and had to let people die from heart attacks, appendix ruptures, etc. because they simply had no doctors to treat non-Covid patients either!!!) Even if this strain is drastically less deadly than the previous ones, it still carries the risk of death or long-lasting symptoms for the unvaccinated.