Bloomberg Writer: We Should Start Planning for a “Permanent Pandemic”
Evan James
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Bloomberg has published an op-ed titled “We Must Start Planning For a Permanent Pandemic.” It was written by Andreas Kluth, and he claims we may never “go back to normal.”
Kluth tries justifying this claim by saying that the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates so much that we may never attain herd immunity.
“The main reason is the ongoing emergence of new variants that behave almost like new viruses,” he says. “A clinical vaccine trial in South Africa showed that people in the placebo group who had previously been infected with one strain had no immunity against its mutated descendant and became reinfected. There are similar reports from parts of Brazil that had massive outbreaks and subsequently suffered renewed epidemics.”
“That leaves only vaccination as a path toward lasting herd immunity. And admittedly, some of the shots available today are still somewhat effective against some of the new variants. But over time they will become powerless against the coming mutations.”
Kluth cites the “more infectious but no less lethal” variants of the virus as “the worst news” from an epidemiological perspective. Yet he fails to recognize, or simply doesn’t care for the purposes of his piece, that the overwhelming majority of people who get COVID-19 either don’t know they have it or suffer through mild symptoms for a few days.
“If this is the evolutionary trajectory of SARS-CoV-2, we’re in for seemingly endless cycles of outbreaks and remissions, social restrictions and relaxations, lockdowns and reopenings,” he says. “At least in rich countries, we will probably get vaccinated a couple of times a year, against the latest variant in circulation, but never fast or comprehensively enough to achieve herd immunity.”
Yeah, this ain’t it, chief. Kluth even acknowledges in the next paragraph that there have been numerous pandemics far more deadly than the COVID-19 pandemic and that we now have incredible science and technology to treat infected people, create vaccines, and so on. It’s absurd and completely anti-historical to suppose that COVID-19 should be seen as a potentially “never-ending pandemic.”
Andreas Kluth could very well be the person Kurt Schlichter had in mind when he wrote his recent Townhall op-ed titled “Understand That Some People Love the Pandemic”:
“Yet there’s this slice of the populace that gets into it. They resist a return to normalcy because their normal lives were not that great to begin with and this is the most exciting thing that will ever happen to them.”
Read the rest of Schlichter’s op-ed here.
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