I’m not in a great mood this morning considering South Africa has been made a pariah state overnight for being transparent and countries are quickly shutting borders once again. My point is not to downplay or dismiss the new “Nu” variant of COVID-19 but to beg that we put this in perspective and act not simply quickly, but smartly.
“Nu” COVID-19 Variant – Nothing New Under The Sun
Headlines around the world are warning of a “vaccine resistant super strain” that has been discovered in South Africa. First, it is way too early to know that. Second, even a new strain with sufficient mutations to render current vaccines less efficacious is not the end of the story: Germany’s BioNTech SE, which worked with Pfizer to develop the most-used COVID-19 vaccine in the world, is already on it and will know the answer in two weeks. If necessary, BioNTech can create a new vaccine adjusted to the variant in six week and ship it shortly thereafter.
The European Union has called for an immediate ban on flights to South Africa. God Save The Points points out that many countries are punishing South Africa for doing the right thing by being transparent and not even balancing it with greater access to vaccines or debt relief. Sadly, by punitive actions like shutting down all air traffic, countries that are trying to do the right thing are incentivized to hold back information.
The tourism-reliant South African economy has been hurt so much during the pandemic. Shutdowns have crippled local economies and the unemployment in South Africa has worsened to 34%.
And now this.
“Thanks for letting us know. Now we are going to block you.”
And I’m not saying that is not a right approach. Ultimately, a nation must protect its citizens first or it ceases to be a nation. Lockdowns buy us time…as much as I hate them, they serve a useful function and should not be summarily dismissed when so much uncertainty exists.
But make no mistake: the “Nu” strain is already in our midst. It has been identified in Belgium, Israel and Hong Kong. The case in Israel is from a traveler who was not even in South Africa, but Malawai.
If you think it is not already in the United States, you just wait and see as flights between the U.S. and South Africa go out packed every single day, not to mention connecting traffic though other parts in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
This new strain has already eclipsed the delta variant as the dominant strain in South Africa. New cases have jumped from about 300 per day to 2,465. That’s a big jump and the death count, still low, will start to rise.
In terms of our vaccine debate, we’ll soon see vaccine advocates saying, “See, this is what happens when selfish people refuse to be vaccinated” and anti-vaccine folks saying, “See, the vaccines are worthless and even work to weaken protection against new variants.” (for the record, I don’t put theses positions on equal footing)
And I actually don’t want to debate that today here or in the comments section, but merely note the reactions around the world to this new variant will divide us further.
So now you understand why I’m not in a great mood. Still, we should not panic. Mutations and new strains have always been part of the plan. We will figure this out.
CONCLUSION
I can speak only as a traveler here, but I view the move to effectively punish South Africa for doing the right thing a very questionable approach. While ignoring it is also not the answer, we are fooling ourselves if we think “Nu” is not already with us. When that is confirmed (give it a few days to a week), are we going to shut down worldwide travel again? To what end?
Folks, remember the headlines with the delta variant? They were the same. Don’t panic this morning. We’ll get through this.
The media is the one that drives the panic more than anyone else, along with (let’s face it, leftist world leaders) who seem to want to shut their entire economy down at any hint of an uptick.
If you look up polls online, people vastly overestimate the risks associated with COVID. It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously, but two years into this I think we have to find a way to stop the cycle of perpetual panic and overreaction and allow people to go on with their lives
If you work in the travel industry as I do, today is very bleak. My company was looking forward to increased hiring for a very robust 2022… I just don’t see that happening now. I feel so very, very defeated.
I’m so sorry to hear that. I send you my best wishes.
I know what you mean. I had been a corporate travel agent (CTC) for 35 years and was let go back in March. My expertise was in international business travel, and that was and still is dead. I still cannot find a job in travel, and am starting to look for other careers, which will mean starting at the bottom and at age 56, I do not relish this.
Good luck to you.
She was also unvaccinated and had very mild symptoms – she also did not spread it to anyone else in her home. That’s all very good news.
I’m sure that it has already spread significantly around the world. The Belgian lady who had it had traveled to Egypt only. In a few days they will also find it in pockets around the U.S. and starting to spread.
She was also unvaccinated and had very mild symptoms – she also did not spread it to anyone else in her home. That’s all very good news.
Israeli cohort studies about the vaccine report a complete loss of effectiveness after 6 months from second dose. The problem resides with health personalities appearing in TV over promising results and now backtracking. Panic is fanned by portraying opinion as fact. Borders are being closed because hospitals have limited resources and medical staff is burned out.
Everyone is going to get covid, it’s not a death sentence.
STOP the panic, turn OFF the TV. Stop the mass fascism by world leaders and corporate fascist ceos who are kissing tail hoping for scraps if and when the shtf.
Those that are most vulnerable, do what you need to do, but let the healthy people live and work.
Some of us have been hurt by this vaccine, but we don’t matter, but we are being ignored.
The politicians, the bureaucracy, the media community, the medical community, evil stupid liars ALL.
Agree 110% Deer!
The virus contains greater risk of further mutation than most have believed possible or likely. The dominant view of late has been that too much mutation would make it less fit, rather than more fit.
This particular mutation may entail some vaccine escape, but it’s not because the virus is ‘trickier’ but because we’re still vaccinating against the original Wuhan strain. Strategies that attack the spike protein may be less effective when that protein changes sufficiently.
We need to be better prepared for variants. We need to be doing more genomic surveillance. We need to be fast tracking vaccines against variants (multivariant and pan-coronavirus work) we need to approve Paxlovid as well as Merck’s pill, and why on earth does clinical guidance at this point not exist for fluvoxamine?
It’s too early to know if this variant is *the* big deal though there’s some early scary data. But this variant suggests some of what has led to recent complacency (including my own!) should be called into question. What’s our plan for variants that doesn’t involve months of wringing our hands?
Agreed in full and the early data is indeed alarming. For the record, I was not criticizing your recent headline/story – I had written this before I saw your piece. But I do think the scaremongering that is going on across many media outlets is counterproductive.
It is productive for their profits. Stoking fear and rage made 2020 yugely profitable for the mainstream media. When have you ever seen age-stratified death statistics in the news?
From Sunetra Gupta at Oxford:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11/24/vaccines-never-route-eliminating-covid-entirely/
People need to keep getting COVID for us to reach herd immunity. If you’re fat, lose weight. If you’re old, shield. The vaccines are not going to prevent the virus from spreading. Stop worrying and learn to love herd immunity.
Fluvoxamine has been off-patent for 15 years, Gary. Ivermectin’s patent expired 25 years ago. No yuge windfall profits for Big Pharma, so little incentive to push them, much less study their effectiveness.
A just-published CDC study shows “vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons”:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.21265796v1
Vaccine hesitancy in the US is highest among those with PhDs:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1
I have to repeat that I know two PhD scientists who work for Big Pharma who refuse to get vaccinated. I don’t wish to get sick, but I am not convinced that getting repeated doses of the current novel vaccines will be better in the long run than getting a more generalized vaccine later or even getting sick and then getting vaccinated afterwards. Will UA-CCP be dancing on my grave if I get sick and die?
What an annoying crock. The articles you cite (besides being pre-print and not yet peer reviewed) don’t even say what you claim. Case in point – Ph. D’s. Do you think no one would bother to click on the link.
Annoying because they don’t fit your authoritarian, “follow the science,” “low-information, MAGA deplorables are ruining everything” narrative? Being a pre-print doesn’t make a paper invalid. The papers don’t say what I claim? I literally copied and pasted from the paper on the infectiousness of the vaccinated. As for the study on vaccine hesitancy, here’s some text stating what I referenced:
“The association between hesitancy and education level followed a U-shaped curve with the lowest hesitancy among those with a master’s degree (RR=0.75 [95% CI 0.72-0.78] and the highest hesitancy among those with a PhD (RR=2.16 [95%CI 2.05-2.28]) or ≤high school education(RR=1.88 [95%CI 1.83-1.93]) versus a bachelor’s degree.”
“Those with professional degrees (e.g., JD, MBA) and PhDs were the only education groups without a decrease in hesitancy, and by May, those with PhDs had the highest hesitancy. To our knowledge, no other study has evaluated education with this level of granularity, which was possible due to our unusually large sample size (>10,000 participants with PhDs). Further investigation into hesitancy among those with a PhD is warranted.”
“Particularly hesitant subgroups include Native American and Multi-racial groups of all ages, and White and Blacks adults <35 years; adults with ≤high school education or PhDs."
What peer-reviewed papers justified mass lockdowns? Racism being the most important threat to public health? Were Fauci & Co. just following the lead of the CCP? Current CDC director with a cervix Rochelle Walensky thought China did a heckuva job.
https://reason.com/2021/11/24/rochell-walensky-really-strict-lockdowns-china-fda-cdc-covid/
Oh, and the vaccine hesitancy study has been peer-reviewed (whatever that is worth).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552100259X
Nothing to say? Just like Aaron and UA-CCP, you can’t actually engage me on the facts.
Posts like this are why I only read Matthew’s blog. Unbelievable
My reply was to Gary and not cargo
I agree. But that’s not the world we love in. Unfortunately the flocks of sheeple are many and they blindly follow those who have been discredited or have ulterior motives. Drama sells.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWvnF9TFsm4/
https://twitter.com/theinsiderpaper/status/1464272073589768199?s=21
There is absolutely no need for panic or alarm. Scientists in South Africa have said the cases are all extremely mild and it may be the case that the virus is more transmissible but less virulent. But on that front, cases in Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho have all plummeted. So how transmissible is it?
Relax people. It’s going to be fine.
Covid will never go away. How about learning how to live with it? We can’t simply move to our basements every time there is a new variant out there.
But I don’t have a basement?
I suggested that people be concerned — but do not panic in bold letters — as a result of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus back on Friday, January 24, 2020, Matthew:
https://thegate.boardingarea.com/should-you-be-concerned-about-coronavirus/
A lot of good that did. People panicked anyway…
…and now that South Africa did the right thing, the citizens of that country are being punished by the governments of other countries anyway.
That’s because no one listens to your Big Head. Get out of here you Z List blogger.
Brian2: +1.
Cohen can’t get anyone to read his crap so he brings it to a blog that is read. I wish Boarding Area would go ahead and do the right thing.
https://twitter.com/jordanschachtel/status/1464287843887501313?s=21
https://dossier.substack.com/p/nu-variant-hysteria-originated-with
It’s a small world after all.
I am so blessed that so many infectious disease experts are on this message board? Did you guys find your calling in some other field or were you just kicked out by the hospitals for being too overqualified?
https://i.postimg.cc/7LW5B0ny/97248-CC1-3-C7-C-4-DF4-AF3-A-4-F7-E36624-D4-D.png
Debit:+1
Happy new variant weekend. Again.
https://i.ibb.co/JsLxdVq/43-EECBD1-F6-D9-4-EFD-85-F9-5698-FD181192.png
So embarrassed for those buying into this.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWvyoXxlRC5/
It’s actually day 666 today.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWv10pJPh5_/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWv5dT8P4tQ/
1. This is all panic porn (also known as bullshit) and an attempt to destabilize world economies, personal freedoms and autonomy.
2. We will all die. Eventually and of something…..I guarantee it.
Exactly!
Two years in and people are still buying into the hype. Yes, viruses can be deadly. As is life itself. We. Will. All. Die. Someday.
There are will multiple “variants” until the end of time. Continuing to plug ourselves full of drugs will not make it go away. It does not take an infectious disease specialist to know this.
Life is terminal. Live while you can.
Should be good for Joe “mandate” Biden
Viruses mutate. This is nothing new. This is going to happen for the rest of our lives and it’s time for the world to move on. Do we really need to report on every new strain?
I agree, but when the world panics and institutes flight bans, I have to write about it.
Please approve my comment that had two links. Went to spam I guess.
https://twitter.com/alec_zeck/status/1463599453424828417?s=21
“Lockdowns buy us time…as much as I hate them, they serve a useful function and should not be summarily dismissed when so much uncertainty exists.”
So do you agree with the approach being taken here or not? If you really believe that the lockdown approach works, then what you’re seeing is exactly what should be done. Every time there’s a new variant of concern, all countries should lock down and ban international movements to “buy us time” until more is known about the seriousness of the variant, the efficacy of vaccines can be confirmed and/or new boosters developed, and government has time to set up field hospitals, enforce mass vaccination booster campaigns, get therapeutics distributed, etc.
You say lockdowns work, but then seem to argue that this variant is already in wide circulation and therefore wouldn’t be effective anyway. You can’t have it both ways.
They do work but even though they do, I do not support them for the chain of unintended consequences that result.
New variant hysteria comes from same institution that popularized lockdowns & previous COVID scares
https://dossier.substack.com/p/nu-variant-hysteria-originated-with
Other tweets by Jordan:
Closing your borders for a coronavirus strain, one of 100,000 or so, is the peak of stupidity. You cannot stop an endemic virus. The narrative is meant to foment panic and total hysteria. Stop accepting the “war on a virus” narrative.
The “Dark Winter” narrative has again been spawned. And they are relying on the cattle to bring it home. It worked in winter of 2020. It’s the EXACT SAME playbook from last year.
Nu” or “Omicron” is a double edged weapon to excuse failures of governance & implement more tyranny. Just as Delta was reason why the lockdowns failed, this “new variant” will be the excuse for the shots.
“It wasn’t us, it was that damn mutation, caused by the non-compliant!”
EXACT. SAME. PLAYBOOK.
https://twitter.com/michaelpsenger/status/1464284791310721027?s=21
Given their breathtaking, ongoing mendacity, Republicans have some nerve handing out health care advice. Nobody takes you liars seriously, for good reason.
Not a Republican nor a liar however we are certainly not grateful to your contribution to the destruction of the greatest country in the world. If America falls, there is no where else for people to go. Enjoy your time on the Titanic. We will make sure you get no lifeboat.
Ha ha you believe RFk junior? You are a idiot of the highest order. But then again not of the white entitled tins on this site are.
Why would I not believe a Kennedy who has been right hundreds or thousands of times now since COVID began? Has not been wrong once actually. Might want to do some research.
Trump is just as to blame as Biden
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWv9BT_Faw6/
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Building Totalitarian State: “This Is Armageddon. This is the Final Battle. We Need to Win This One.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWv9Uz-l_0w/
Omicron strain. Don’t panic. Until we have a lot of data in this strain we won’t know whether all those mutations really make a difference. About time we had vaccines based on delta and its cousins.
True vaccines would require the virus/variants to be identified by Koch’s postulates, which has never happened to this day. Last year a scientist offered a $1 million dollar reward to anyone who could do it. No one accepted. Biggest fraud and psyop in human history.
Scary to think that the most dangerous COVID strains may hit at the same time as people are “just over it and don’t care anymore.”
I get that people can only live in fear for so long, but unfortunately nature just doesn’t care about that.
The vaccinated variant:
https://twitter.com/realtompappert/status/1464313702920986627?s=21
Too many people enjoyed Thanksgiving and you know liberals don’t want the same thing happening at Christmas. Too logical to not be true. Worst case, more elderly die and Uncle Joe “saves” Social Security like he fixed oil prices.
And maybe this is just “woke” payback to South Africa for all their crimes against humanity over the years. They treated that Modelo dude or whatever name was bad for years. Like the Salvation Army says, it’s time to punish Whiteness.
So you’ll stop traveling here & there, & writing trip reports?
Travel only if absolutely necessary..
I’m not stopping.
I won’t stop even if it kills me.
That would be correct.
Thank you for a logical answer to an illogical question. Some of us never stopped in 2020 and certainly won’t now. Keep those upgrades coming! And skip the AA Turkey Pastrami sandwiches.
Right on Matthew. This latest strain will yield a similar result pattern; intent to scare as many people as possible, rely upon the governments for “guidance” and assistance, further surrender of personal freedoms, one of which is travel. This is going to get played out new strain after new strain and I choose to not live in fear for the next decade. Have been vaccinated and booster shot recipient myself, taking precautions yet as you say: “Live and Let’s Fly”….so keep on living!
Stop getting boosters. It’s for your own good.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/sharyl-attkisson-steven-gundry-pfizer-moderna-vaccines-heart-attack-risk/
“Ultimately, a nation must protect its citizens-first-, or it ceases to be a nation”
Well said….
Whose NU
I thought the USA has Omricorn
This article was written before WHO has skipped Xi and assigned the new variant the omicron name.