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4/ Then the vaccines came out, supposed medical miracles that would end all this fuss and bother about wearing a mask and keeping a safe distance from people when you’re sick. They were the result of “Operation Warp Speed,” which a #covid minimizing President nonetheless pushed to get the country back to normal in time for his re-election. Ironically, that same President would wind up making those vaccines all but impossible to obtain when he finally got back into the Oval Office, after waiting through the term of the other party’s own #pandemic minimizer.

The vaccines had done their work: The country had moved on, and the masks had both literally and figuratively come off.

Ed Suominen

@edsuom@hachyderm.io · 6 months ago

1/ It’s so difficult to speak of what’s happening that maybe it’ll be easier to take the “future historian” viewpoint. So here goes. I’ll dispense with the distraction of quotation marks.

—
In the mid-twenties, the #virus had infected the entire world multiple times, with the exception of a few rare holdouts (note: including this writer, at least so far) who persisted with grim determination to avoid it, never breathing shared air except with an #N95 respirator stuck to their faces. There was no other way. It made communal meals impossible and inserted an awkward visible barrier into social interactions.

Ed Suominen

@edsuom@hachyderm.io · 6 months ago

2/ These holdouts sometimes tried to assure themselves and each other, in the quiet sterile substitute of online interactions, that wearing an #N95 was no big deal, that you could do pretty much everything like before excepted masked. But then in other postings on the same forums, they would speak of friends lost, families estranged, career opportunities missed.

There was a terrible cost to this vigilance. And yet it was a cost worth paying, because the #SARS2 virus charged a much higher price for its repeated visits to the bodies of its hosts.

Ed Suominen

@edsuom@hachyderm.io · 6 months ago

3/ The highest price was paid by those infected early, before vaccines were developed to blunt the worst of the damage. Over a million people died in the U.S. alone, gasping for their final breaths on breathing machines, their loss all but forgotten just a few years later. The first wave of #LongCovid sent millions more to their beds, where all too many would remain for the rest of their lives. They too were quickly purged from the collective memory, inconvenient reminders of the terrible danger this airborne menace presented by the simple act of breathing somebody else’s air.

Ed Suominen

@edsuom@hachyderm.io · 6 months ago

The vaccines had done their work: The country had moved on, and the masks had both literally and figuratively come off.

Ed Suominen

@edsuom@hachyderm.io · 6 months ago

5/ There was, however, a problem with the vaccines. They were simply not up to the task of preventing infection and the insidious harm of hosting a virus that could mutate past everyone’s immune systems—vaccinated or not—within months of its massive and sustained global spread circulation while damaging those immune systems in those it infected.

What was initially treated as the unfortunate anomaly of a “breakthrough infection” among perhaps 10% of vaccinated people became the norm by 2022. If you had gotten the last of a seemingly endless series of boosters (note: this writer has had five) within the previous month or two, you might have half the chance of paying host to #SARS2 as someone next to you in the restaurant who had never been vaccinated at all. And six months later, after your antibodies were gone, after the virus had evolved some more, the difference in odds was hardly worth considering.

Ed Suominen

@edsuom@hachyderm.io · 6 months ago

6/ Once it became apparent that the noble act of baring one’s arm in a drugstore would not end the #covid19 #pandemic no matter how politically enlightened one might be, the focus switched to minimizing not infections but the social and psychological impact of infections. “Mild” became a favorite word when describing any complaints the body had about fighting colonization by a virus that traveled along its arteries and veins while damaging them, burrowed along nanotubes to reach neurons deep inside the brain, and killed off the T-cells that defended it against further infections. Anyone who spoke of such unpleasant realities on Twitter was in for a barrage of righteous indignation by Those Who Knew Better.

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