Revenge of the Unvaxed

September 13, 2021

Everyone is sick and tired of Covid-19, but the way out of this ordeal is neither straightforward nor nigh. The problem is that the pandemic war has become a biomedical game of Whack-a-mole: Vaccines work but the vast majority of human beings can’t, or won’t, take them and these unvaccinated persons are incubators for the virus and its mutants. Most annoying is the widespread and politicized intransigence in the U.S. against vaccines which is making life miserable, frightening workers away from returning, and becoming a drag on the economy.

“The virus continues to spread almost exclusively among those who are not protected. We will be facing a pandemic of the unvaccinated in the coming months,” warned Dr. Ugur Sahin, co-inventor of the Pfizer vaccine, in a September 10 interview in Der Spiegel.

Even some of America’s rabid right-wingers in the media are noting the problem.

“They are the new 99 percenters: The vast majority of Americans who are getting serious cases of Covid-19 or dying are unvaccinated,” stated a piece in the Republican New York Post. “While COVID-19 cases spike across the U.S. [including pediatric cases] the overwhelming majority of deaths and hospitalizations from the virus continue to overwhelmingly be among unvaccinated Americans, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC].”

In August, more than 1.6 million Americans were hospitalized with Covid-19 and 99.35 percent were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, according to the CDC. And 99 percent of those who died were unvaccinated. The caveat, however, is that the vaccines aren’t foolproof and 2,427 fully vaccinated Americans have died from “breakthrough infections”. But the overall figures prove the bloody vaccines work which makes it all the more annoying that 100 million Americans haven’t gotten two needles.

These unvaccinated are to blame for the surge in cases in August and is why, on September 9, President Joe Biden passed an executive order mandating employers to require that their workers be fully vaccinated or provide a negative Covid-19 test weekly. The mandate applies to corporations with more than 100 workers, healthcare organizations, and federal contractors, involving tens of millions of people.

“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” he said angrily. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”

That’s of course exactly what the anti-vax Republican governors intended – cause a lot of damage – so they immediately announced they will fight against Biden’s mandate in the courts. Fortunately, however, more celebrities and healthcare professionals are starting to speak out. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel spoke for many when he said: “Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they're going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed. That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. The unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.'" 

Even if the U.S. sorts itself out, the world remains virtually unprotected which means it may not be a good time to book that trip to see Kilimanjaro or Machu Picchu. Maybe for years. That’s because a pandemic is a pandemic, meaning that it is global and spreads around the world mutating into more deadly viruses.

Now there’s also the Nipah Virus and Mu Variant to worry about, in addition to the Delta. Both are even more dangerous than a Republican at a Donald Trump spreader event. For instance, Nipah is highly rare but kills between 40 to 75 percent of those infected, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It is, in other words, the plague on steroids.

Mu is now in the U.S. and also on the World Health Organization’s watch list because – this is really depressing – it is more transmissible than Delta or Alpha and appears to be resistant to existing vaccines. All of this means that achieving herd immunity is “not a possibility” especially with the Delta variant circulating, said Oxford expert Sir Andrew Pollard, because when Delta is exposed to vaccinated people it is also transmitted by them. “We don’t have anything which will stop that transmission,” he said.

This is why Israel, the most inoculated country in the world with Pfizer vaccines, has been unable to prevent its own fourth wave caused by Delta. "This is the battle—we're doing everything we can to stamp out the deleterious effects of the virus, and it's fighting back, primarily with mutations that can make it spread more easily, cause more severe illness, and/or evade our defenses,” noted one epidemiologist.

So how does it all end? When vaccine adaptation can catch up to the new mutants and/or when at least 80 percent are vaccinated, that’s when. Experts say we are halfway there in the U.S., but won’t be out of the woods until 2023. But then the country must quarantine itself from other infected nations. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Dr. Sahin estimates there could be enough vaccines by 2022 for everyone in the world.

"We have got to get vaccines to the low- and middle-income countries, not just for humanitarian reasons, but because strategically that's where the variants are going to come from,” said one scientist.

Tragically, those nations want vaccines, while the unvaccinated in the world’s wealthiest nation has been weaponized by uneducated and ruthless Republicans. For the rest, this means Covid-19 jail continues for everyone from the fully vaccinated to children under 12 who have been getting Covid-19. Pfizer has developed a booster and is close to completing vaccines for children over five years of age. But until then, people must continue to don masks and avoid venues wherever vaccine passport protection is denied -- be it in schools, stores, cinemas, offices, recreational facilities, social gatherings, or regions.

Most importantly, everyone should avoid the unvaxed like the plague they represent. They may be family or a friend, but the unvaccinated among us, to me, are nothing more than Covid-19 variants on two legs.

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