RE: Oh, one last editorial comment. I find it highly ironic that, on the one hand, there is a huge conspiracy created to foster the belief that Dr. Fauci personally funded the Chinese to develop a bioweapon virus to wipe out humanity, while on the other hand, the conspiracists tell you that Covid is such a mild virus that no one should worry about it and all of the concern about it is just hype. So, which is Covid?
I don’t think that even Rand Paul himself accuses Fauci of wanting to develop a bio weapon to wipe out humanity. He wants Fauci to come clean on his involvement in funding the Wuhan Virology Lab. Whether that research involves gain of function is for another post I’ll want to address later.
Secondly, the ORIGINAL strain of the virus was deadly enough to cause worry, especially its morbidity on the sick and elderly. However, subsequent variants have been shown to be progressively weaker as the virus cannot evolve to kill its host if it is to mutate to survive.
The argument is and always has been the NECESSITY of the lockdowns (especially among the young ) and the necessity of coercing people to take the vaccines under threat of losing their livelihood.
Rand Paul may not have said it, but it is an idea I have seen expressed. I do read and comment on other forums.
Secondly, the ORIGINAL strain of the virus was deadly enough to cause worry, especially its morbidity on the sick and elderly. However, subsequent variants have been shown to be progressively weaker as the virus cannot evolve to kill its host if it is to mutate to survive.
I am not at all certain that the lower fatality rate of the virus (~1%) now as compared to when it first emerged (~7%) is due at all to the evolution of the virus. Since it emerged, it became the subject of many different lines of research.
No one knew how to treat Covid patients at first, but thanks to a lot of studies, we now have more effective treatment protocols. We also have effective antiviral treatments that were not available early on. Once there were survivors, antibodies could be extracted from their blood to treat new patients, and I think monoclonal antibody treatments are now available.
When the Covid vaccines were first introduced, they were prioritized to the group of patients most at risk, the elderly, such that there is a very high proportion of vaccinated elderly people. Since the group at most risk of dying from Covid is now protected, the overall death rate decreased. In addition, vaccinated people are less likely to experience severe illness or to die, which also lowers the overall death rate.
As far as the virus itself, I don't think its fatality rate would have changed much at all if we could not have developed treatment protocols, antivirals, and vaccines. It still infects cells by attaching to the ACE2 receptor, and still uses a furin-mediated pathway to cross the cell membrane into the cytosol. It continues to evolve in order to evade our immune system, mostly by changing epitopes on the spike protein to avoid the antibodies that bind those epitopes.
For a virus, it does not matter if the host survives or dies. Those are both dead ends for the virus, so the driving force behind its survival is its ability to infect a new host before host immunity kills it or the host dies. In general, viruses are most successful when they cause a mild enough disease where the host remains capable of performing (albeit in a limited fashion) ordinary activities like socializing with other people. SARS-CoV-2 is successful because even though it is deadly, most people who are infected feel well enough to be able to socialize while sick. And they are contagious before symptoms appear, which is another survival mechanism for the virus.
The argument is and always has been the NECESSITY of the lockdowns (especially among the young ) and the necessity of coercing people to take the vaccines under threat of losing their livelihood.
The success of the lockdowns is shown in the evidence. During the first year of the pandemic when there were widespread lockdowns, people were working from home, and stores were delivering merchandise curbside, there were 350,831 deaths directly caused by Covid. (There was a total of 528,891 excess deaths, mostly related to the fact that medical resources were consumed with Covid patient care, leaving people with other conditions like heart disease with inadequate treatment.)
In 2021, the second year of the pandemic, we had a new president who did not take Covid seriously and began to lift quarantine and masking restrictions. Between lifting the mandates and the fact that vaccine was only available to the most at-risk groups until late in 2021, Covid deaths jumped to 416,893. In 2022, when vaccines were available to everyone and over 80% of the population received at least one dose, deaths dropped to 244,986. (I have kept a spreadsheet of Covid cases and death data since March 2020.) This is a rough evaluation; there are epidemiologists who have gone to the trouble of comparing Covid rates and deaths in counties where mandates were enforced versus counties were they were not and found higher rates in counties that did not enforce the mandates. (Sorry, no reference to that study, but I could probably find it if I spend some time looking.)
As far as requiring people to get vaccinated or get fired, I really have no issue with that. People whose jobs require extensive contact with the public are most at risk of catching and spreading communicable diseases. Kids in school are incubators of disease and transmit diseases quite readily due to their lack of hygiene. I had to get a measles vaccine before attending college, hepatitis A and B vaccines because I worked with human cells in the lab, and Japanese encephalitis and smallpox vaccines before I could go to Korea. Yes, smallpox has been eradicated. The smallpox vaccine protects against closely related pox viruses, so is still used sometimes. Vaccine mandates play a very important role in public health.