Coronavirus

At the start of this year, I took a flight from London to DC. For its duration, I wore a cloth mask that I had been given for free at a bookstore — the kind of mask that Most Experts now say does not meaningfully prevent viral spread. At one point, shortly after I’d finished eating, a tall male flight attendant asked me to pull my mask up — I, of course, did as asked. A few hours later, while the lights were dimmed and I was drifting off for a nap, my mask slipped to just below my nose, the same flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a pamphlet from the airline.

This is a public service announcement from Cockburn: the mask mandates have got to go — for everyone’s health. Even America’s most progressive cities have lifted their face mask restrictions after the cresting of the first Omicron wave — but some of their denizens are hooked on the taste of government boot, and are going mad at the prospect of being weaned off it. Cockburn was sent a video by his nephew earlier this week showcasing this phenomenon: a masked Washington local cussing out unmasked teens at a DC Metro station. Masks are, for some unscientific reason, still required on public transport in the nation’s capital — despite not being needed in schools, gyms, stores, bars, restaurants…you get the picture.

New York mayor Eric Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for all of the workers in New York City on Thursday. It was a unifying moment for a city in desperate need of some good news. Just kidding! Eric Adams did not lift anything. Instead, Bill De Blasio’s successor offered a group of New Yorkers an exemption from having to take the Covid-19 vaccine. According to CBS, “New York-based performers and athletes who play for New York's home teams will be exempt from the city's vaccination mandate for private businesses.” This is great news for wealthy Yankees players and insufferable celebrity attendees of this year’s Met Gala. After all, nothing says VIP treatment like being able to make your own medical decisions. Now for the bad news.

When the Omicron variant (now categorised as BA.1) swept across the world at the end of last year it was seen by optimists as the final chapter in the Covid story – it was so contagious it would infect essentially anyone, but would be far less likely to cause serious illness. Now a new wave of Omicron – the BA.2 variant – is becoming dominant in many parts of the world. In the UK, cases are again on the rise. Genomic surveys show that BA.2 made up 76 per cent of new cases in England as of 5 March. The below is from the Sanger Institute: So what's going on? Firstly, both the BA.1 and BA.2 variants do not have an intrinsically much higher growth rate than any previous variant. Instead, they have spread globally for two main reasons.

What better way to mark the two-year anniversary of “fifteen days to slow the spread” than by getting a fourth Covid shot? In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told Margaret Brennan, “Right now, the way that we have seen, it is necessary, a fourth booster right now.” Bourla, who made $17.9 million in 2019 before the pandemic, wasn’t even wearing a white lab coat as he made his diagnosis. No stethoscope from the studio prop room either. “The protection that you are getting from the third, it is good enough, actually quite good for hospitalizations and deaths. It’s not that good against infections, but doesn’t last very long.

Don’t call it a comeback! Rumors emanating from Dante’s seventh circle of political hell suggest that disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo could return to this mortal plane to challenge his replacement Kathy Hochul in a Democratic primary. Unnamed sources, who Cockburn is sure definitely aren’t former Cuomo employees and diehard loyalists such as Rich Azzopardi or Melissa DeRosa, told CNBC that the Luv Guv “has been fielding calls from supporters about a possible run against his former lieutenant governor” and that “his aides have been conducting their own internal voter polling on a potential matchup.

Did you make good use of the neatly palindromic 2/22/22? To refresh your memory, it was a day that turned out be the narrow window between the moment when the evolving “science” suddenly allowed Democratic governors to start lifting their states’ mask mandates, and Vladimir Putin launching his special mission to “protect the people” in eastern Ukraine. I hope you enjoyed it, because given the way the mainstream media portray the news these days, it may be a while before we’re all allowed our next respite from the seemingly permanent existential crisis that runs as a through-line to our human condition.

For some time now, Covid has been rising in Scotland - there are now more Scots in hospital with Covid than at any time throughout the winter. A freak, or a sign of what’s to come nationally? The ONS survey answers that question today, confirming that Covid cases are rising nationally: some 4 per cent of England’s population, it says, would test positive. In Northern Ireland it’s closer to 8 per cent and in Scotland 5.7 per cent. Have waning vaccines created space for another wave - and do we need to worry? Just as Gauteng and South Africa then Lambeth and London were the early warning signs for Omicron’s rise and speedy peak, so seems to be Scotland now. The ONS survey have shown cases rising there for weeks and it’s been puzzling scientists.

Officials at the Transportation Security Administration are telling media outlets that their agency is poised to extend mask wearing on airplanes for another month while they await guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Like everything else, through the length of the pandemic, this move lacks logic. The idea that a piece of cloth will protect you while you sit sandwiched between 200 other passengers inches away from you is an idea only our incompetent and compromised CDC could invent. Then, a short while into your flight, all of the passengers remove their magic cloth covering and eat and drink, spitting their particles into the air to travel about the cabin.

The Sage committee was set up as a pool of experts on tap to advise government. During the pandemic, it mutated into something different: a group whose advice ended up advocating long lockdowns. Its regular meetings have now been discontinued, with questions being asked in No. 10 about whether it’s time to disband Sage and set up a new structure – in the same way that Public Health England was reformed and became the UK Health Security Agency. There will be plenty of lessons to learn. But we might not have much time to learn them: a new variant or (given the growth of genomic sequencing) a new pathogen could come along at any time. This matters.

“My way, or the highway,” was, at one time in the not-so-distant past, quite a popular phrase to associate with American dads. Cockburn recalls his fellow classmates invoking the maxim as evidence to their fathers’ strictness. “My dad is tough, man, he always says ‘it’s my way or the highway.’” On the contrary, Cockburn would respond, that statement shows your father to be quite reasonable, pusillanimous even: “Ahh, you’ve got it easy, then; your dad gives you a choice. Mine doesn’t allow the highway option.” Having a choice is what differentiates a command from a recommendation. Not terribly complicated — yet this simple fact apparently evades a great many in our media class.