AOC’s got it, you’ll get it. Just live your life
SO Alexandria OcasioCortez has COVID. This is not nature’s judgment, it’s not a sign of irresponsibility, it’s not a sign that she’s been watching Fox News or listening to Joe Rogan (although she probably should; she could learn something). It’s not a sign of anything except that everybody is getting this mothraforking virus, vaccinated or not.
Oh, but also it’s maybe a wee small indicator that AOC’s views of how the virus works have been given the REJECTED stamp by the Celestial Commissar of Irony. Get well soon, congressperson!
Being young, fit and vaccinated, Ocasio-Cortez is likely to suffer very little from COVID, and I certainly hope that’s how it turns out. But it’s as clear as the mask on your face that the virus is not going to be confined. Like Al Franken, its dirty little hands are everywhere.
The common COV
Whether you live in a red state or the bluest district of the bluest state and merely spend your Christmas vacation in a red state because that’s the only way to have fun anymore, the virus will probably get you, just as everybody catches colds. Defeating the virus by shunning the unvaxxed is not an option. Note that the copiously vaxxed are super-spreading the thing at BuzzFeed parties.
Yes, everyone should get vaccinated, but everyone should also recognize that there are going to be millions of holdouts and that their existence is nothing to worry about. Even in sophisticated, please-let-government-run-everything Europe, vaccine uptake has stalled out: at 75% fully vaccinated in France, 71% in the UK and 68% in Switzerland. It’s at 62% in the United States.
The US is and always has been more individualistic and liberty-loving than other countries, so we’re never going to get near 100%, and we’re also younger than other countries, meaning fewer of our people actually need the vaccine against a disease whose impact varies hugely by age.
We initially thought the vaccines would stop infections and hence transmissibility, but that’s as dead as Joe Biden’s dream of being hailed as the new FDR.
Vaxxed are spreading it
The discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier, noted in The Wall Street Journal, “Data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people” and “vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious.”
Shunning people who get the virus and separating out the unvaccinated and wearing cloth masks as religiously as people put a “Coexist” bumper sticker on their Subarus have all been pointless.
Let’s get it over with
“We are going to protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers,” President Biden said on Sept. 9. No. The vaccinated are already protected (against serious illness) by . . . the vaccine. If they get the China virus from the unvaccinated, they’ll almost certainly be fine.
A humbled AOC is about as imaginable as Billy Porter guest-hosting for Sean Hannity, but even she must be thinking, “Maybe we should chill out about the recriminations since people do need each other’s company.” After, as The Post put it, AOC was “Caught Maskless Again in Miami Drag Bar,” where she hugged various people in a crowded space, maybe the rest of us can ignore Dr. Doom on TV telling us we shouldn’t socialize even on holidays?
We’re now wrapping up the second year of “two weeks to slow the spread.” We should do what we can to protect the elderly and vulnerable.
But if everyone else is going to get the thing, we might as well get it all over with. Don’t you wish that had already happened?