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Views from the third world. Earth.


Vaccines Aren’t Stopping COVID And We Need To Talk About It

Getting my 4th shot with my parents. I support vaccines 100%. But they are not 100% of public health

To fly into India I had to either be vaccinated or have a PCR test. The former of course makes no sense anymore. Vaccinated people are getting infected left and right. I’m quadruple vaxxed and had COVID last month.

Vaccines were sold by the West as a panacea for the pandemic, but that’s been exposed as pablum. Vaccines were always just a part of a larger public health policy, but they ignored and denigrated all that shit. Following their lead, many countries have just given up on basic measures like test/trace/isolate. And so COVID is ripping through our populations even worse than ever.

This is causing real death, disability, and destruction to real people, especially the most vulnerable. People are getting infected over and over, and we still don’t know the long-term consequences of this shit. Having a raging pandemic is both unconscionable and completely normal now. That’s the really scary part.

When COVID hit there was a (stupid) debate about fighting it and just giving up. But now, three years in, giving up has won in almost every country except China. COVID could have been an opportunity to strengthen global cooperation, deploy wastewater and PCR testing everywhere, set up mRNA and vaccine production faculties in every country, improve ventilation and hygiene on a generational level, and generally adapt our shared immune system as a species. Instead, we’ve become weaker and even less prepared for the next pandemic, like Monkeypox.

The reaction to Monkeypox is basically a shrug. People are just used to governments not doing shit, rich people not giving a shit, and being surrounded by deadly diseases all the time. During COVID the West attacked China, never prioritized testing, blocked global vaccine production, and completely ignored ventilation. Given that most of us live under the White Empire in more ways than not, this is effectively global policy everywhere but China. Fuck around and find out. Over and over.

The big lie that sold this raw deal was that vaccines would stop COVID. That if you just got vaccinated you’d be safe, and any continuing spread was just anti-vaxxers' fault. This flies in the face of public health advice forever (do everything! all at once!), but for people propagandized with Hollywood stories where heroes find one technological solution at the last minute, it made emotional sense. But COVID gives a fuck about our feelings. COVID just adapted around vaccines and then blew right through them.

This is not the fault of vaccines. They were never meant to be used this way, just shooting up while doing nothing else. Vaccines are generally used to prevent pandemics from even starting, not to stop one that’s raging wildly. You still need test/trace/isolate for that, and western governments used vaccines cynically as an excuse to give up on all that, and to even attack China for continuing to fight COVID off.

The only people to really benefit here are the pharma companies who A) monopolized many vaccines and B) now have a market forever. The sad fact is that if vaccines had been nationalized and internationalized and if a real effort was made to vaccinate the world, it might have been possible—along with other public health measures—to actually beat this thing. But the corrupt West never even tried. Countries like Sri Lanka and Mongolia that briefly held the line just couldn’t anymore. COVID washed over everyone like a flood, while some lines on the stock market went up.

This was a crime against humanity and public health, because the overhyping of vaccines also makes people vaccine-hesitant. To any reasonable observer, the vaccines didn’t work. They didn’t do what they promised. But it was western governments who over-promised and under-delivered, to distract from the fact that they were doing fuck all. Now their bank accounts are credited, vaccines are discredited, and the world is immeasurably poorer.

Not only do we have COVID forever, we have Monkeypox and any number of new diseases coming down the pipe. We have weakened trust in vaccines, obliterated the idea of test/trace/isolate, and are even more divided and less adapted as a species than before. They say that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Well, COVID does kill us and it’s made us weaker. That’s the saddest thing of all.

Further Reading (which is just depressing at this point)