The beginning of the end.
CW: pandemic stuff
So the Biden administration thinks they can vaccinate everybody who wants one by the end of May, and Christopher Wray is being allowed to talk openly in Congress about the threat of white nationalism as a force of domestic terror.
And wow, am I having a complicated emotional reaction to all this.
I can feel something uncoiling inside me: that knot of tension and worry that has been a constant companion since, oh, late 2015. We’re not out of the woods on the domestic fascists front, by any means—but at least we’re admitting we have a problem. We’re not out of the woods on the pandemic front, either, but wow is the news encouraging.
I mostly agree with this article by Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic about the goodness of vaccine news and how it’s being undersold. I think she’s missing the fact that a lot of that probably (in my humble etc) stems from trauma response (don’t believe in good news because it will just be snatched away from you) and also, you know, “If it bleeds, it leads.” I also kind of roll my eyes slightly at a journalist who has been leaning hard on apocalypse porn for a while now complaining about other journalists “doombaiting” but hey, what drives clicks. (I think Tufekci is very smart and often right but is also, you know, as constrained by the hot take outrage doomspiral economy of punditry for money in this era of social media.)
I suspect we’re looking at a future of getting a coronavirus booster to go with our annual flu shot, which isn’t such a bad fate—especially if there’s any chance it will offer some protection against other coronaviruses, which is complete speculation on my part, by the way. There may be other long-tail silver linings to the pandemic, also: we got lucky, so far, in so many ways. This disease is so much less fatal than its close relatives, SARS and MERS: it’s a small blessing that a much more severe disease with a similar rate of transmissibility didn’t emerge.
Especially given what a clusterfuck most of the world’s pandemic response was, and how likely it is that another pandemic-ready zoonotic pathogen is out there somewhere in a bat or rodent or waterfowl, biding its time. Climate destabilization, human migration, increased globalization, and habitat incursion are going to continue to make new diseases more and more likely. We may not get a hundred years before the next pandemic.
And the next one might be a lot worse. Imagine a pathogen as transmissible as SARS-CoV-2 and as deadly as HIV.
I mean, hell, just imagine smallpox, mark 2.
(We didn’t get a hundred years this time, either, but AIDS is often conveniently forgotten. The new-ish research on the origins and the long, slow spread of the disease before it exploded in the early 80s is astounding, by the way. Paid subscribers who got the book club email this month already saw some previous discussion of David Quammen’s longer work, Spillover. HIGHLY recommended.)
So the fact that we have some more recent practice on dealing with a pandemic, that we now know how the new vaccine technologies (which are amazing) work under pressure, that we have figured out some ways to support supply chains and self-isolation, we’ve normalized masking—that is huge. That will save lives, if this happens again before we again conveniently forget.
I think it’s hugely significant that we’ve basically eradicated flu transmission over the past season. (It also points out just how freaking contagious covid is, and the weird ways it spreads (Zeynep again) in clusters, mostly.) These precautions work. These vaccines work.
Now we just need a vaccine against fascism.
tl:dr hang in there. Spring is coming.
Don’t give up the ship.
best,
Bear