It’s an old wartime trope: it’ll all be over before Christmas! But dare we hope that the Ukraine war will be over sooner, rather than later?
The legacy media narrative that Vladimir Putin is losing the war is clearly more wishful thinking than hard-headed analysis. Victory may not have been as swift as Moscow would have liked, but the result seems in little doubt. The only real question is the timeline.
But there’s one sure sign that the war will be over sooner, rather than later: the Establishment is warming up the covid scare again.
Scarcely two months after the Omicron variant drove coronavirus case numbers to frightening heights in the United States, scientists and health officials are bracing for another swell in the pandemic and, with it, the first major test of the country’s strategy of living with the virus while limiting its impact.
Covid is the gift that has kept on giving. For the politicians, it’s the ticket to undreamed-of power. For the public health bureaucrats, it’s not just about power, but, even more intoxicating: fame and money, money, money! For the legacy media, it’s been the clickbait sugar-hit they desperately needed, as their ratings and subscriptions plummeted with no Bad Orange Man to hype.
But even covid could only deliver the goods for so long. Luckily for them, a handy war came along. Oh! What a lovely war!
Still, all wars end eventually (godammit, mutter the elites). Even the Forever War in the Middle East had to run out.
What to do, what to do? Climate change had a good innings, but the energy crisis attendant to the Ukraine war has brought too many people back to their senses.
Let’s give covid another good old college try!
In a number of countries, including Britain, France and Germany, case numbers are climbing as an even more contagious subvariant of Omicron, known as BA.2, takes hold.
In interviews, 10 epidemiologists and infectious disease experts said that many of the ingredients were in place for the same to happen in the United States, though it was unclear if or when a wave might hit or how severe it might be.
Case numbers are still dropping nationally, but BA.2 accounts for a growing proportion of those infections, rising to almost one-quarter of new cases last week. The subvariant is estimated to be 30 to 50 percent more contagious than the previous version of Omicron, BA.1.
Ooh, scary, right? Well… nah. We’ve been through “new, improved, more contagious variant!” routine before. As all but the most panicked Covidian quickly realised, there’s “contagious” and then there’s “deadly”. The two have been inversely proportional: the scary, scary Delta variant was more contagious… but much weaker. The ooga-booga-lock-up-your-grandmother Omicron variant was even more contagious — and a full 75% weaker again.
No matter how much they try and gin up the new variants, they’re obviously a bit of a fizzer.
In some parts of Europe, like Denmark and the Netherlands, the peak of the BA.2 wave has already passed. In other countries, where case numbers have climbed since early March, hospital admissions have remained flat or risen only slightly.
Even in Britain, where the worst that they can point to is a slight increase in the very old in hospital “having covid”, they also concede that all that really means is “tested positive”. Half of even those didn’t test positive until after they were admitted: in other words, they were exposed to the virus in hospital, not in the community.
In the US, waste water testing shows that viral levels are so low that scientists can’t even say for sure where levels are growing or not.
But then we get to the real issue: money.
But the federal government is warning that pandemic funds are drying up […]
Even health experts who said they had become accustomed to the boom-bust cycle of pandemic funding said they were shocked that the money was drying up so soon after the country had outlined plans for adjusting to a new normal.
New York Times
Never get between a government bureaucrat and a trough of taxpayer money.
Or, for that matter, a dying legacy media and some guaranteed clickbait.
If a good, old war stops delivering the goods, well, they’ll just try shooting a few more volts up the jacksie of the Covid Monster.
Anything to keep the public in a state of panic, and the money rolling in.