PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER PHD
With natural exposure immunity and early outpatient treatment, and when combined with no reports of increased lethality, the WHO’s reaction of generating panic toward “Omicron” is causing needless fear and panic. So too, with the Biden administration’s newly imposed travel restrictions which will achieve nothing and will once again disrupt trade and violate human rights.
The WHO has said that the Omicron variant can spread more quickly than other variants. Likely true. The virus is behaving just how viruses behave. They are mutable and mutate and, via Muller’s ratchet, we expect this to be milder and milder mutations and not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.
The virus will mutate downward so that it can use the host (us) to propagate itself via our cellular metabolic machinery. The Delta has shown us this: it is very infectious and mostly non-lethal. Especially for children and healthy people. So is the WHO panicking the globe needlessly? Is this Covid-19 February 2020 once again?
The problem with South Africa as is with Australia and New Zealand and even island nations like Trinidad is that it has low natural immunity to SAR-Cov-2. This is because, as we witnessed over the last year and more, if you lock down your society too long and too hard, you deny the nation and population from inching closer to population-level herd immunity. And you have no economy or society from which to reemerge. You devastate your society for a pathogen that is largely harmless to the vast majority of people especially children.
