For those who do not know, the “Cassandra” in the title was a character from Greek mythology who had the gift of prophecy. No one believed her, mostly because they did not like what she prophesied, and so did not want to believe. I know how she felt about that.
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I foresee what no one wants to see, so no one sees it coming : there will NEVER be a final end to the SARS-CoV-2
/ covid-19 pandemic!
It is time to start the next “Operation Warp Speed” and rapidly
develop upgraded vaccines that counter these newer, more contagious, more deadly variants, that we can already see coming. That’s the trend: toward ever more contagious and ever more
deadly forms of this SARS-CoV-2 virus.
There is no longer any defense for being younger: the Delta variant is circulating wildly among
our children in schools, and it is
killing some of them. And some of their
teachers.
That is just the nature of coronaviruses: they mutate fast, and they vary a lot in their threat
characteristics from strain to strain.
The rapid mutation rate is the real enemy here; it is also partly why we have never developed
a cure for the common cold, which is also
mostly caused by several different coronaviruses.
The other part is that they change so fast that any acquired
immunity doesn’t last very long, which
is why you can catch cold after cold on a time scale of only months. We are already seeing that short immunity effect
with the covid-19 booster shot issue.
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It being the case that this virus will be with us
forever, the best weapon we have is new
vaccine after new vaccine, from now on! Forever!
Which means we start now, and we
do everything we can to speed the process without undermining its integrity. But history shows these work well, only when just about everybody gets
vaccinated.
The second best weapon we have is the ancient one of masking
/ distancing / handwashing, augmented in
modern times by an understanding of microbes and disease. We will be using those ancient weapons from
now on, whenever an outbreak of a new
variant not covered by current vaccines occurs.
This tool also only works well when just about everybody does it. You can only stop when everybody is
vaccinated.
The third best tool we have is shutting everything down and
quarantining at home; and we surely
don’t want to have to do that again! Not
unless we are utterly forced to do so! You avoid it by using the other two tools as
effectively as you can.
There are no other tools for fighting such plagues.
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As with other lethal or intolerably-dangerous viruses and
other microbes that we cannot yet eradicate,
we have to make the vaccines for this plague mandatory, and allow only a few exceptions, very few indeed! Examples of things we already treat in this
mandatory way would be whooping cough, polio, etc.
When outbreaks occur with a new variant that resists our current
vaccines, the old masking / distancing /
handwashing tools also have to be mandatory until the new vaccine is fully-administered. It’s not about freedom-to-choose, it’s about the public safety of all of
us: something long established in our
society, and its many predecessors over
the centuries.
Your freedom to choose not to mask, or not to vaccinate, ENDS BEFORE you infect others! Just like your freedom to swing your fist
ENDS BEFORE you strike others. And just
like your freedom to yell “fire” when there is no fire inside a crowded
theater, ENDS BEFORE you injure or kill
somebody in the panic that ensues. Anyone
who tells you different is lying to you.
The sooner everybody comes to realize the real truth about
this “freedom to choose” issue, the
better off we will all be.
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Bottom line: the
sooner we implement the continuing upgrades to these vaccines as an ongoing
program, and the sooner we make the resulting
vaccines mandatory, the freer we will
all actually be.
It really is that simple.
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And so also you can figure out when you are being
lied-to, for political or monetization
purposes. In particular a lot of social
media sources (and some others,
particularly politicians) profit in some way from feeding you more of
what you want to hear, without regard to
truth, and not feeding you any of the
truth that you need to hear.
Which is something you should never, ever tolerate!
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A final thought:
Denying schools the ability to control infection rates in their
facilities with the vaccination and masking tools, is essentially criminal child
endangerment. It is essentially criminal
assault when businesses are prevented from using these tools. Both child endangerment and criminal assault are
very serious crimes, but this is
happening in a lot of states, and for no
better reason than a faulty political ideology based on misinformation. There
is no real excuse for such dangerous behavior.
I suggest that the local district attorneys in the places
where these schools and businesses are located, should file criminal charges against the
politicians in power who are trying to stop the use of these tools against the
virus.
Specifically, the officials
who sign the offending orders, and the
officials who attempt to enforce them, should be arrested on criminal charges. Not civil lawsuits, criminal charges! There is no office-holder immunity against
that.
And it needs to go through the justice system process, all the way through trial. Guilt is pretty clear, just ask the medical professionals. We need to make some examples out of those
who behave so dangerously. Then that dangerous
nonsense would stop.
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Update 9-19-2021: a shorter and substantially-edited version of this article appeared as a board-of-contributors item in the Sunday 9-19-2021 Waco Tribune-Herald newspaper.
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