higher education: stopping the spread by spreading the exposed

the public health clown car careens on

it was simply not enough that we have reached this stage of public health guidance:

despite the fact that even mainstream media and vaccine companies are now acknowledging the original antigenic sin/immune imprinting issue and questioning whether it even makes sense to tailor vaccines to variants as doing so may just elicit the same response already known. (amusingly, an outright admission that boosters are not needed as you already are trained in the response)

(if only there had been some internet felines around to see this coming. oh, wait…)

but now we have this bizarre vaccine devotional prayer of “i got vaxxed, boosted, and then got covid. but i’m sure it protected me!”

this may be the first recorded example in history of stockholm syndrome as an adverse event from vaccines.

(of course, i suspect pfizer sees it as beneficial, so…)

and yet even that seems to be wavering in the face of “everyone gets covid today!”

boosters are failing as fast as they get injected. claims they are protective “cuz, antibody levels!” are falling apart. it’s a non-clinical marker. more of an antibody that a vaccine can already dodge is just a bigger book of wrong answers to the biology exam.

i think it might be time to rename omicron “the oprah variant.”

but even at our alleged bastions of learning, no one can keep anything straight.

on the one hand, they seek to “restrict social activities” but on the other, they go full clown world and turn what would be functional quarantine of the sick, isolated on university campuses, into, wait for it:

crop dusting america with covid through a diaspora of students heading home as exams go virtual. just like we did in march of 2020.

we. have. learned. nothing.

seriously, if you wanted to spread omicron as rapidly as possible throughout america (not inherently a terrible idea, but clearly not what any of these folks want) can you even top “take all the exposed college kids and send them home right after exposure”?

because i seriously struggle to find a more pervasive and effective vector.

if these people were really serious about covid, they’d hunker down and ride it out surrounded by low risk peers and mild illness, especially in an isolated town like ithaca.

instead they are taking 25,000 dandelions and blowing them all over the american lawn.

this is either supremely selfish, desperately cowardly, or proof positive that they do not believe a word of this pandemia panic they so relentlessly push and enforce.

these universities are 97-99% vaxxed (and highly boosted to boot). any variant ripping through them is, by definition, vaxx evading.

and if these folks are to be believed about needing to limit social contacts, well, this sure does not look like that. this will be an epic superspread event.

this is literally sailing around the whole island of the galapagos and dropping off plague rats on every beach.

the good news is that this damage is not that significant in any sort of long run calculation. limiting social contact etc has not and will not accomplish much (or likely anything). it’s an aerosol respiratory virus. it’s already everywhere and there is no stopping it.

might this dandelion dander festival make it a tad more rapid? maybe. but we’re talking about weeks, not months.

would it probably have been smarter to just stay for exams? yup.

but this genie was never going back into the bottle. so in the end, it’ll be much of a muchness.

in the final analysis, this is evidence than college admins are cravens and/or hypocrites (ooh, quel surprise, non?) but likely not of an avoidable spread bomb to come. that’s already going on in all the seasonal zones.

but boy is it a sign they value their own hides and covet some extra holiday break more than they care about the pandemic itself.

that’s a fact worth filing away for the next time they try to stake out any moral high ground here…