Imagine a fire that rages so long that trees burn, grow back, and then burn again. Imagine a fire where water stops working. That’s the situation with COVID-19 today.

Omicron is able to ‘burn’ people that were already infected. It’s able to burn people that were vaccinated. And so COVID-19 is able to rage on. It’s COVID-∞ now. It’s made a mockery of our already inadequate herd immunity. It’s going to burn the motherfucker down.

The sad, infuriating thing is that it didn’t have to be this way. China showed a clear path to COVID-Zero, but western countries chose to attack China, prioritize profits, and ‘just live with the disease’. They decided to make mRNA vaccines effectively ‘whites-only’ and spread only hesitancy about available Chinese and Russian vaccines. This led to the predictable result of an unpredictable pandemic. The virus has mutated out of control.

By not sharing water when we had water, we now have a fire that is fucking water-resistant. By not putting out the fire when it was small we have a fire that is impossibly big. The infuriating thing is that these were all choices.For pharma companies it’s all profit. The sad thing is that for so many human beings, it’s just pain.

People might say that Omicron is a milder variant. That we should even be thankful for it. This is madness. Omicron may appear mild because it’s ripping through people with some immunity, but then it finds people without immunity and kills and wounds them just the same. People might say—like the US White House has—that this this is unvaccinated peoples fault, but billions of people have been simply blocked from getting vaccines. Almost all children are unvaccinated. Immuno-compromised people simply can’t. The meaning of herd immunity is to protect these people. It’s fucking wild that we’re just throwing these people to the wolves*.

Furthermore, popular media simply does not convey what mild means. ‘Mild’ is a medical term that means a lot of things short of ‘not dead’ which are nonetheless miserable ways to live. Mild is not something you want happening to you, and Long COVID is—for so many people—the end of life as they knew it.

Like a ‘mild’ fire, it’s still too much fire. The only thing we should have done with fire is what places like China did and what places like Mongolia, Vietnam, and Australia tied. Just put it out.

Instead we got straight denial from Europe and America, which rather than fighting initially small outbreaks ended up infecting most of the world.Then we got corrupt bargaining with pharma companies, letting them monopolize the simpler mRNA technology which could have been churning out vaccines on every continent by now. And now we have been condemned to just acceptance of endless suffering. Good fucking grief.

What started as COVID-19 is now COVID-∞. And please never forget that this was a choice. COVID-19 was a challenge that some nations stepped up to, while some nations dragged us down. When faced with a raging fire, rich, white countries chose gasoline.

*wolves don’t actually kill humans, there are only a handful of recorded cases in human history. We kill wolves. I use their name only as part of a saying.