Omicron variant, worldwide vaccination, and blinkered priorities

 Fall in the northern hemisphere means Spring in the southern hemisphere, which means new COVID variants are in bloom.  Omicron is the latest to flower in several southern African nations, and let's try not to freak out, but there are always some very bad worst-case scenarios.  Epidemiological information is still sparse, and you should get your epidemiological information from an epidemiologist, not me.  Instead, let's do a bit of political commentary.  Do you know how much it would cost to vaccinate the planet?  Everyone?  Estimates range from $50 billion to $70 billion, from what I've been reading.  Big numbers, by any normal, human telling.  I can't afford that, and in all likelihood, neither can you.  Otherwise, hi Elon!  Take the spliff out of your mouth and vaccinate the fucking planet!  But I'm getting to that.  Not the spliff, nor Elon.  The vaccination process.

Anyway, it is strange to say this as a political scientist, but I am almost completely indifferent to most political issues at this point.  Suppose we reduce an arbitrary policy issue to two positions:  my preferred position JB, and the obviously stupid position, DJT.  By definition, U(JB) > U(DJT), yet for an arbitrary policy issue, U(JB) - U(DJT) ≈ 0.  Why?  Because most of the issues in our political domain are, in technical terms, "bullshit issues."  There's climate change, the fundamental structure of western, liberal democracy (by the classical definition of liberalism), and right now, there's COVID.  There are are a few other topics that pop their heads up above that approximately-equal sign on occasion, but basically, politics in this country are bullshit.  Stable, wealthy capitalism.  That's where we were.  As I have written, many times, the reason the left is losing its shit right now is that they won.  New Deal/Great Society liberalism put its last major piece into law with Obamacare, and the right lost its shit for overlapping but distinct reasons.  So the left has been casting about looking for fights to pick, while the right has gone crazier and crazier because they lost, and now, western, liberal democracy is being destabilized by lies, idiocy and autocratic ambitions from the party defined by a personality cult built around the worst human being in the history of the species, while the left becomes a caricature of a caricature.

So I just don't fucking care.  Whatever issues are being discussed, I don't fucking care.  If it's not climate change, COVID, or the fundamental structure of democracy, I don't fucking care.

Which brings me to the politics of the day.  S.  Days.  Congress passed an infrastructure bill.  Yay, I guess.  Roads are nice.  I drive on them, and presumably, so do you.  Please don't drive on the sidewalk.  And now, the Democrats are twisting themselves into knots over a Badly Be-titled Bill.  Fuck off.  If they can't figure out how to name a bill, then I don't have to work very hard figuring out how to make fun of it.  It's Saturday morning.  I don't have to work at all.  In fact, I'm commanded not to work.  So, I did exactly as much work as I was commanded to do on that joke.  Anyway, $1.7 trillion.  With tr..... ill.  I cannot trill my tongue, either in speech, or in print, so I suppose it is of no great importance.  Regardless, that is what we call, in math, a "fuckload" of money.  Keep in mind, also, that it follows from a similarly priced infrastructure bill.  Perhaps they should have waited for those Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals.  Regardless, that's a lot of moolah.

Way more than the cost of vaccinating the planet.  Remember vaccinating the planet?  This is a post about vaccinating the planet.

I officially do not care about most political issues.  The Democrats keep trying to call this new bill a "human infrastructure" bill because the modern/far left has decided that you can change reality by changing language.  I do not like these people.  There is no such thing as "human infrastructure."  This is an attempt to manipulate opinion through the manipulation of language.  Infrastructure is popular, so someone decided that maybe the Democrats could increase public support for their commie shit if they just used the word, "infrastructure."  The problem, of course, is that it is not infrastructure.  But what if we lie?  What if we put the word, "human," in front of the word, "infrastructure," and make it a thing that isn't a thing?  Ta-da, Bob's your uncle, and while there's no Bob, no uncle, and no infrastructure, it's so crazy it just might work!  No.  Don't let people manipulate you like this.  I hate it when people try it on me.  But I've done this rant before.  Let's focus instead on something else.

This rant is brought to you by the number, 2!

Two.  As in, it is two orders of magnitude cheaper to vaccinate the planet than pass the fuck-you-don't-manipulate-me-with-titles bill.  There's no such thing as "human infrastructure."  You may like stuff in that bill, but I don't give a shit.  You know what I do like?  Pfizer.  Also, Moderna.  Why?  'Cuz there's a thing I really don't like.  COVID.  And the cost of vaccinating the entire motherfucking planet would have been two orders of magnitude less than just one of the bills the feckless, worthless, useless Democrats are sucking their thumbs and cowering in their blankies as they bumble through the process of trying to pass.

And as this happens, you know what else happens?  A little thing called "evolution."  You see, science is not actually a tool of the patriarchy, or "white supremacy,"-- the most egregious demonstration of concept creep* in linguistic history-- or whatever else the wokestirs are saying this week.  In fact, failure to understand it is killing Africans at a higher rate.  Why?  Because posturing about postmodernist, anti-intellectual blather doesn't actually help anyone, unless you count increasing your total number of twitter likes as helping someone.  That someone being, you.

You know who could fix this?

We could.

The Democrats could.  On the cheap, comparatively speaking.

Hell, Joe Biden could do this on his own.  National emergency, move money from some plane or tank we don't fucking need, take a dumptruck of money over to Pfizer, another over to Moderna, hire people fast and get this fucking done.  Funny thing about emergency powers.  Trump actually declared the emergency on March 13, 2020.  Just sayin'.  It would be far more defensible than Trump's bullshit with the wall.

Without a vaccinated global population, COVID evolution just happens.  Like Trump lying, lefties being worthless, sanctimonious twits, and climate change, it'll keep happening.  Omicron variant will not be the last.  In densely populated, unvaccinated areas of the world, new variants will emerge.  And they will spread.  There has only ever been one way.  Vaccination.  The only country that has ever been able to do it?  Us.  The US.  Hey, do you think it's a coincidence that the vaccines came from private, for-profit US companies?  No.  It wasn't some little, fucking work-play thing in Denmark, and Bernie Sanders can fuck the fuck off.  This is how this shit works.  Now, distribution.  The only way that works is if we, as a country, decide to put a fucking stop to this, because if we don't, that's it, it's a COVID world.

So do the numbers on this.  $1.7 trillion on the don't-let-them-call-it-an-infrastructure bill when we're in the $50-$70 billion range for vaccinating the planet?

In terms of "ROI"-- return on investment, in business speak-- gotta say.  The long-term numbers would point towards jabbin' everyone in their fucking arms.  We hit a wall here in the US, and other countries would hit their own walls, but in terms of the numbers, come the fuck on!  ROI.  Marginal value of the next dollar.  Moral terms, economic terms... You saw the market yesterday when omicron hit?  A blip?  I dunno, but rationally, this is the right thing to do.

But of course, my observation is that it isn't even really on the table.  This is a proposal that, in any marginal-dollar calculation based on morality or long-term value, beats anything all-to-hell.  Republicans are caught up in anti-vaxxerism, so they're obviously not going to take up the cause.  Democrats?  Hell, this is hitting places like sub-Saharan Africa hard.  Omicron emerged from South Africa, we're going to get more strains from densely populated, impoverished countries, the left seems to value life more if there's more melanin content in a person's skin, which is why none of them gave a flying fucking shit about Tony Timpa, but where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, they're all speak.

So what does that say?

I return to a long-running theme:  the left's struggle to redefine itself.  New Deal/Great Society liberalism essentially completed its project with Obamacare.  Messy, ugly, and far from any idealized notion of what such a healthcare proposal would be, it nevertheless added the last major piece of the puzzle.  Everything after that, within the scope of FDR/LBJ-style liberalism would be shoring up the gaps.  Which would have been fine, but unexciting.  Far more exciting to start a new struggle.  They just had to figure out what, with the internal struggle within the left being the struggle to figure that out.  Full-on socialism?  Identitarianism?  Hard to reconcile, since Marx would call race and all that shit just false consciousness, hence the struggles, but that has sort of defined the internecine battles, to some degree.  Then, you have the struggles within the identitarian lefties over whose "identity" takes political priority, and that's basically a framework for understanding why and how the left goes to war with itself these days.

Yet all of this is predicated on the notion that the challenge of finding a new fight is actually challenging.  As of January 2017, the primary challenge was combatting Trump's authoritarian moves and the ethno-nationalism associated, yet that did not necessitate an agenda of its own.  That... was actually kind of the problem, hence the struggle between the more traditional socialists and the rising wokestirs.

I mean, they could have just said climate change, but I guess that would have been too hard.  Or too easy.  I don't know which.

And right now, there's climate change, and there's COVID.  And to be fair, there is some climate policy in that whateverthefuck bill.  It is, however, buried amid a bunch of other shit about which I do not care, and neither should you, because it does not address any of the most consequential issues of our time.

Prioritization.  A budget is a statement of priorities.  A budget should follow from priorities, but we don't do that 'round here.  Instead, show me a spending bill, and I will tell you your priorities, and this country's-- the left's included-- are blinkered.

I have periodically reminded you of how much good could be done, on a marginal dollar basis, with water sanitation, around the world.  Waterborne pathogens just have a staggering death toll, and we could fix that if anyone cared.  Fuck this country, though, sanctimonious lefties included.  Stay in school, and you'll be fine in this country, so our debates are over insignificant shit.  I don't care.  At this point, though, vaccinating the planet is just in our own self-interest.  Yet even with a two-order-of-magnitude difference, the Democrats are focusing on a largely irrelevant, yet very expensive bill on issues about which I do not care, because they are struggling to define themselves into irrelevance.

And don't worry.  They'll be irrelevant soon.  If they have no real plan to stop that, they may as well vaccinate the planet as they approach obsolescence.

Coco Robicheaux, the title track from Louisiana Medicine Man.

*Haslam, Nick (2016).  "Concept Creep:  Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology."  Psychological Inquiry 27: 1-17.