Omicron variant

Covid is beginning to spike in parts of Europe again — and sewage data indicates rising cases in the US are imminent. Online and on television, talking heads and tweeters are asking, “Where’s Dr. Fauci?” They’re posing this question to rile up the masses and show that Anthony Fauci’s omnipresence on cable news over the last few months was largely political, and happened in concert with the Biden administration, with whom he appears to be in lockstep agreement on everything from masks to mandates. It’s a salient point not without merit, but I would take it a step further and ask: who cares where Anthony Fauci is?

What happens when a government thinks it can distribute a consumer product more efficiently than normal retail channels? Boondoggle and failure come to mind. Two months ago, President Biden announced plans to buy 500 million at-home Covid test kits and mail them to anyone who wanted one. The Department of Defense put in orders for $1.275 billion of tests from iHealth, $340 million from Roche and $306 million from Abbott. How many tests those eye-popping figures bought from each company has never been disclosed, but Abbott, the largest test manufacturer, has a reported production capacity of 50 to 70 million tests. It is safe to assume that the quantities involved commanded an enormous portion of total manufacturing capacity.

The nation’s capital is finally dropping its vaccine and mask mandates…mostly. DC mayor Muriel Bowser reluctantly followed the science and ended the vaccine requirement for the district’s businesses effective Tuesday — rendering the city’s “get the vax to see the acts” campaign null and void. The decision to require proof of vaccination now falls to individual businesses in the city — a civil rights victory, surely, given that just under a quarter of DC’s black residents remain unvaccinated. Bowser’s move comes after a lengthy battle with venues such as The Big Board on H Street, which had its license suspended by the ABC Board earlier this month for refusing to enforce the mandate.

Some cross-magazine skirmishing to contend with this week. Over at Commentary, Christine Rosen has written an essay in which she accuses the Atlantic of having a “nervous breakdown.” Per Rosen, one of America’s oldest and most trumpeted periodicals has turned into a ward of left-wing neurotics, quaking in fear over the pandemic, climate change, attractive color schemes, you name it. “The Higher Perspective of the Atlantic," she writes, “is an elite species of panic.” Call it the great Atlantic panic — it's kind of like the Satanic panic except instead of devil worshippers there’s just David Frum muttering as he checks his WiFi router for evidence of Kremlin interference. Anyone who’s read the Atlantic lately knows Rosen is exactly right.

We volunteered to serve in the biggest medical experiment in human history. We accepted the biggest peacetime suspension of civil liberties in American history. And we agreed not to ask difficult questions about the origins of the virus. Now it’s time we recovered our freedom — and exercised the responsibility that sustains it. The Omicron variant isn’t the end of the world. It looks more like the beginning of the end. The case numbers are rising even faster than the rate of inflation, but the ICUs aren’t overflowing and the death rate remains low. Covid-19 seems to be becoming endemic, like all the other bugs we might catch in a normal winter. If you’re elderly or obese, or if you have another co-morbidity, then you have a way to go yet.

It’s 4 a.m. and instead of sleep, powerlessness is on my mind. It’s a concept I’m quite familiar with, being that I’m in recovery: it’s the idea one must embrace to “take the first step.” The idea is, by admitting your powerlessness over whatever behavior or substance you are abusing, you begin on the journey of liberating yourself from the bondage of addiction. It’s a paradox I had a hard time reconciling in my early days of sobering up. A great line about step one in some of the Alcoholics Anonymous literature plays on a loop as I stare at the ceiling. “Who cares to admit complete defeat. Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness.” However, the list of things I’m powerless over has grown long.

After months of yelling about how important at-home testing kits are, Joe Biden forgot to buy them. Oops! In his address on Tuesday, the president told Americans, “We also need to do better with at-home testing. So, I’m announcing today: the federal government will purchase one half billion — that’s not million; billion with a 'B' — additional at-home rapid tests, with deliveries starting in January.” But according to the New York Times, the half billion with a “B” tests are some ways out: “Mr. Biden’s administration has not yet signed a contract to buy the tests, and the website to order them will not be up until January.” The president’s potential successor Pete Buttigieg once wisely said that there are two kinds of Christmas shoppers.

So, you got a cold. It happens around this time every year, to almost everyone. You got the sniffles, your head is a little foggy, you have an occasional sneeze, there’s some persistent phlegm lingering in the back of your throat. It’s mildly annoying, and you’re reminded this is bound to happen at least once every winter, and life goes on as normal but with a few more tissues in your pocket. Give it three days, a week max. Maybe you take some over-the-counter medicine, have chicken soup for lunch, sleep next to a humidifier. Upon greeting friends or coworkers, you politely decline a handshake or hug. “Sorry, I’ve got a cold,” you tell them — and they appreciate your consideration. “Oh, I just got over that,” one might say, “something’s going around.

President Joe Biden's message to the unvaccinated is clear: you can't sit with us! Biden claimed he was ushering in an era of national unity, and instead we've received the Mean Girls administration. They intimidate those who don't want the shot by threatening their jobs and accusing them of being walking vectors of death and disease, and encourage the rest of the country to attach a social stigma to being unvaccinated. Someone should tell Biden that the bullying and isolation tactics are more Queen Bee than Captain America. The schoolyard taunts started over the weekend when the White House sent out a not-so-happy holiday message promising Americans who don't get vaccinated that they're headed for a winter of "severe illness and death" for themselves and their families.

Cockburn always thought Thanksgiving was the holiday designated for sharing madcap political views that one day you'll regret saying aloud. So kudos to Fox Nation's Lara Logan for extending the tradition into advent, by offering a comparison between Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele on Monday's edition of Fox News Primetime. Logan, a former war correspondent, was invited on to discuss the Omicron variant. Presumably the logic behind the booking was that the variant emerged from her home country, South Africa. Here's the expertise she chose to provide: On Dr. Fauci, this is what people say to me. He doesn't represent science to them, he represents Josef Mengele. Dr. Josef-the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews in the second world war and in the concentration camps.

Another holiday season, another Covid strain to quintuple-mask against. This one, discovered in South Africa last week, is called omicron, and how fitting that it sounds like the codename for some evil plan that was hatched in a volcanic lair. The omicron variant feels like nothing so much as a twelfth-in-ten-years action movie sequel, derivative and exhausting, asked for by no one, with even Vin Diesel and The Rock unable to tell each other apart anymore. Omicron is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, meaning Covid has already produced a couple dozen other variants. (The WHO, which names the strains, skipped nu, the thirteenth letter, so it wouldn't be confused with "new," as well as xi, the fourteenth letter, presumably to avoid offending a certain Chinese public health hero.