“Living with COVID” has been a lie
This is a fantastic thread from Luca Ferretti:
“Living with COVID” has been a lie. Not because it isn’t possible, or because it isn’t the right goal. But in practice it has clearly morphed into “let’s stop talking about COVID, and the problem will disappear by itself”. A dangerous and irresponsible bet. Most of the political & health authorities have implicitly chosen to rely mainly on vaccination to control COVID. A reasonable choice… if only the vaccination campaign would have aimed at protecting the entire population with sterilising vaccines adapted to the new variants. Instead, despite hundreds of vaccines in the pipeline, there are no next-generation or sterilising vaccines on the horizon… little large-scale clinical trials (apart from Israel)… and few updated vaccines against variants (Moderna’s Omicron-Delta booster and little else). Of course, protection for children has been repeatedly delayed (English kids between 5-11 were vaccinated only last month) and kids under 5 are still unprotected worldwide, with the laudable exception of Cuba. Everybody’s waiting for the US FDA, whose intentions are unclear. It is truly depressing to see so little and slow concrete progress on what is meant to be “the ultimate weapon” against SARSCoV2. It seems to suggest that we don’t really rely so much on it, and that we’re satisfied with postponing the problems until the next not-so-mild variant. Simple precautionary public hygiene measures – face masks and ventilation – are mostly ignored. Testing and surveillance, downsized or limited. And the growing stress on the healthcare system is being swept under the carpet, even as we risk paying the price for it for years. This is not the product of any large conspiracy. It is simply the result of a combination of neglect, inertia, bureaucracy, selfishness, careerism, lack of long-term perspective and so on, among some (though not all!) politicians, doctors, academics, bureaucrats and others…
(tags: covid-19 sars-cov-2 public-health medicine healthcare pandemics vaccination)