Does the public understand that "variant" means "vaccine resistant"?

Getting boosted is critical because the virus is changing. Other forms of mitigation are critical to slow the rate of change.

Last week, the WHO announced that it will recommend creation of a new booster for the JN.1 variant of COVID-19. One little problem: JN.1 was hyper-dominant all fall and winter but is quickly fading away. Now, its descendent KP.2 is positioned to take off in an early-summer wave. By this winter, when we’re able to get the brand-new JN.1 vaccine, the dominant variant will most likely be a descendent of KP.2. In other words, a distant relative of JN.1.

If you, like me, got the most recent booster, you got a vaccine designed to help prevent and lessen symptoms of XBB.1.5, the variant most dominant in the winter of 2022-23. During that winter, the booster was designed to combat the Omicron BA variants, which were predominant a year prior, in the winter of 2021-22.

You see the pattern?

Often when the topic of COVID is broached, people who have paid little attention since early 2021 point out that “now we have the vaccines.” Ok. Yes. But are you aware of what has changed since 2021? Specifically, the virus?

When Moderna and Pfizer announced their COVID-19 vaccines, the efficacy of the shots was thrilling. Early data showed a reduction in infection - not just severity, in actual infections- of 90%+. Here’s a link to a Pfizer release which states:

Data from 43,448 participants, half of whom received BNT162b2 and half of whom received placebo, showed that the vaccine candidate was well tolerated and demonstrated 95% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 in those without prior infection 7 days or more after the second dose….These pivotal data demonstrate that our COVID-19 vaccine candidate is highly effective in preventing COVID-19 disease and is generally well-tolerated.

In the vaccine world, this is a home run. No vaccines are 100% effective against infection. But if you can get enough shots 90+% effective in arms fast enough, you can achieve what is called herd immunity. Herd immunity is achieved when the “disease gradually disappears from a population and may result in eradication or permanent reduction of infections to zero”. The virus runs out of hosts and dies out.

This was the explicit goal of the Biden administration, stating in early 2021 that we could be “heading to herd immunity by summer”. His exact words were, “I feel confident that by summer, we're going to be well on our way to heading toward herd immunity”. This meant- at the time- getting to a place where the majority of the population has immunity to COVID, and therefore vulnerable people aren’t exposed. It’s critical that people understand that Biden’s COVID response never achieved its own stated goals, rather, the public was gaslit into accepting a new goal: forever reinfections.

Not exposing vulnerable people was a key goal of the lockdowns and other mitigation measures that we adopted in 2020. COVID was/is dangerous, but the vast majority of abled people under 65 who got COVID did not die, even prior to the vaccines. It’s odd to see young liberals pointing to their own mild infections as proof that vulnerable people don’t need to “live in fear,” because it’s very literally the same argument young MAGA people made in 2020. What MAGA attributed to their immune systems, liberals attribute to the vaccines, but the reality is they were never the demographic most at risk. The goal of lockdown was to avoid the exposure of vulnerable groups that would lead to mass death and overwhelm healthcare systems and hospitals. The goal was to protect vulnerable groups until herd immunity could be achieved.

As late as November 2021, amid the Delta wave, Fauci’s projection for what “back to normal” would look like- the point at which we could give up masking and other mitigations- was no more than 10,000 cases a day, nationally. Ideally, under 3300 per day. But today, during the lowest lull we’ve had in a full year, we’re seeing 165,000 COVID cases daily. The winter wave broke 1.5 million cases per day. Since Fauci set the bar of “under 10,000 cases per day” as the marker for “normal,” we’ve never had one single day with fewer than 10,000 new cases. In fact, we’ve never seen a single day with under 100,000 new infections, or 10 times his marker for “normal”, and we’ve had many with over a million each winter- 100 times his marker for “normal”. This is not herd immunity, and it’s not what the government projected or prepared for.

Perhaps this is why our government officials and media continue to try to redefine herd immunity and claim that we do have herd immunity to COVID. Instead of explaining that the vaccine-first (or rather, vaccine-only) strategy was misguided and has failed, governments keep moving the goalposts of success. They declare victory while urging us to get reinfected repeatedly. Reinfections, which, by the way, carry myriad long-term health risks including cognitive damage, heart damage, and disability, among other things.

Herd immunity is what we have for measles, smallpox, diphtheria, mumps, and other vaccine preventable diseases. Vulnerable people- even those who cannot be vaccinated because of medical conditions- are protected from exposure to and infection with these diseases by the immunity of the herd. How is a vulnerable person being protected by “the herd” if the plan is for them to get exposed over, and over, and over again? It’s ludicrous.

The early high efficacy of the original shots is why their debut was met with such jubilation. Walensky, on Rachel Maddow, stated:

today, the CDC reported new data that shows that under real world conditions…not only are the vaccines for those folks, thousands of them, keeping those people from getting sick from COVID themselves, those vaccines are also highly effective at preventing those people from getting infected, even with non-symptomatic infection. And if you are not infected, you can’t give it to anybody else.…. What this means is that we can get there with vaccines. We can end this thing…now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.

A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus. The virus does not infect them. The virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people.

That means the vaccines will get us to the end of this

To reiterate, Walensky explicitly stated that because the COVID vaccines (at that time were believed to) prevent infection, the shots could end the pandemic. This also implies that were the vaccines not able to prevent infection, they would not be sufficient to end the pandemic.

Our leaders overestimated the ability of vaccines alone to mitigate COVID because of early data, before the virus had had the opportunity to counterpunch us through mutation. By July 4, the Biden administration declared victory over COVID. That following winter was the second deadliest wave of the COVID pandemic. It was the deadliest wave for cancer patients.

Winter 2021-22 was a wave of mass death of the exact kind we’d tried to avoid. We saw thousands of people dying per day, while the good folks at the New York Times continued to cover it as no big deal and even spin it as a positive. It was the point at which many vulnerable people, being reassured that with the vaccines and the “mild” strain circulating (Omicron, which was later shown to be no milder than the original Wuhan strain), were exposed to COVID for the first time. Some of them paid for the mistake of believing our government with their lives.

We will likely never see a wave as acutely deadly again, because the hundreds of thousands of people who could not survive their first contact with COVID-19 are already dead.

40% of those who died during Omicron wave 1 were vaccinated. 60% of those dying by the following summer were vaccinated, and vaccinated people still make up the majority of deaths today. Yes, vaccinated people are over-represented in the population- but as thousands continued to die each week this winter, it’s a far cry from Biden’s claims that COVID had become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. In early 2022, his administration blamed unvaccinated people for overwhelming hospitals while tens of thousands of vaccinated people died in a matter of weeks.

Here’s what happened.

Throughout the pandemic, the Biden and Trump administrations- and governments worldwide- have been prone to accepting the most optimistic science as the truth and promoting those optimistic predictions as solid facts. COVID isn’t the only arena where this is true; we certainly see it with climate change. We saw it with our premature declaration that COVID wasn’t airborne. We saw it with our claims that people would only get COVID once. We saw it with the claims that COVID would probably just randomly get milder. And in the case of the vaccines, we saw it with the idea that herd immunity to COVID would be possible, that the virus wouldn’t just quickly mutate around vaccine protection. Unfortunately, the virus mutated very, very quickly.

Has this been well communicated to the public? Or does most of the public believe we are as well protected as we were in the spring of 2021?

Think of it this way: the MRNA vaccines contain a little blueprint for the COVID spike protein. Once your body receives the blueprint, it follows the instructions and builds a replica of the COVID spike protein- in the case of our first-round series of shots, it is specifically, genetically, the spike protein of the ancestral strain. Then, your immune system learns how to get rid of this spike protein. It’s like a training program for your body. When it encounters the real spike protein, your body reacts quickly because it has seen this protein before.

One common analogy used to explain viruses, vaccines, immune systems and mutations is the mugshot. When your immune system encounters a pathogen, it creates a bunch of T and B cells specific to that pathogen- these are basic components of your adaptive immune system. After the pathogen is cleared, most of those pathogen-specific cells are also cleared from the body, but your immune system knows to hold on to a few of them, called memory T and B cells. Think of your body’s memory of the spike protein as a sort of mugshot it can use to quickly identify COVID and respond.

When COVID enters your body, if your immune system has a mugshot of the virus, it can much more quickly and easily mount defenses; it might even clear the virus before it causes any symptoms. Your body recognizes the spike protein.

Now, what happens when mutations appear on the spike protein? Well, that protein becomes harder and harder for the body to recognize. A couple mutations might be analogous to the criminal in your mug shot putting on a wig. But the Delta variant, for example, had over a dozen mutations on the spike protein. That starts to be more similar to a full body makeover complete with nose job and BBL. The Omicron variant had 30 mutations on the spike. It’s getting more and more difficult for your body to recognize the virus as the criminal from your immune system mugshot. In other words, it’s getting more and more difficult for your body to match the protein it remembers from your vaccinations with the protein in the newest COVID variant, especially since so few people get updated shots.

And of course, the mutations haven’t stopped. Omicron is quite genetically distant from Delta; JN.1 is quite genetically distant from Omicron. The greater the genetic distance between the spike protein in your vaccine- which, for most people, are the ones they received in 2021- and the spike protein of the circulating virus, the less effective the vaccines become. From a previous Gauntlet article:

Last year, a study looking at data from 2022-2023 found that children under 5 who received the bivalent boosters had an 80% reduction in risk of ER visits, whereas those who received the original series Moderna shots had only a 29% reduction in risk of ER visits. Studies continually find that new subvariants “escape neutralizing antibodies induced by both vaccination and infection”.

COVID’s ability to mutate underscores the need for people to get boosted, because older shots are more out of date and thus, less effective. The media’s continual downplaying of COVID - their claims that COVID is “over” because we are “vaccinated now”, have actually led to a widespread reluctance to get boosters, which the media then turns around and hand wrings over. Why would people rush out to get a new vaccine when they’ve been told the virus is no big deal?

It’s also an odd choice to call the updated vaccines “boosters,” as this seems to imply a topping up of a shot you already received. We generally don’t call flu shots “boosters,” because they are different shots, formulated for different variants. So are the updated COVID vaccines. But the institutional desire to minimize the ongoing issue of unmitigated COVID has led governments and media to be cagey about this.

How and why does mutation happen? And why does the virus keep becoming more vaccine resistant? Well, using the vaccine as our first, rather than our last line of defense, is part of why we keep challenging the protective capabilities of our vaccines.

Mutations occur randomly; when a pathogen copies itself, those copies contain random genetic mistakes- mutations- that make the pathogen more or less fit. We call the genetically distinct copies variants. The less fit copies are outcompeted and die out. The more fit copies are able to make more copies of themselves and become more common. If the new variant happens to be very fit- meaning very well adapted to its environment- it might start to outcompete the dominant strain and ultimately replace it.

Now, what happens when COVID begins encountering a lot of vaccine protection? The predominant variant is unable to spread and starts to die out. This is what was happening in summer 2021, when Biden declared victory. COVID was finding fewer hosts to safely reproduce in. But because COVID mutated so quickly and with a high degree of genetic variance, some of the original strain’s children happen to be good at outwitting vaccine protection. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say the Wuhan strain has 10 children, and 9 of them are easily identified by the vaccinated body as looking similar to the immune system’s mugshot. Which one survives to duplicate itself? That’s right, the highly divergent strain- divergent meaning, genetically different. The one the vaccinated body could not recognize.

Thus, the more the virus encounters the vaccine, and the more it’s allowed to replicate among vaccinated people, the higher the likelihood of developing highly-divergent, highly-fit strains that evades vaccine protection. That’s why a vaccine should be the last line of defense COVID encounters, not the first. With clean air provided by new, high-quality ventilation standards and HEPA filtration, along with the implementation of new technologies like far UVC, along with normalizing mask-wearing, the virus would encounter fewer humans, and fewer vaccines. It would then have fewer opportunities to learn how to evade the vaccines.

Let’s take a step back. None of this means that vaccines cause mutation or variants. Mutation and variants happen whether people are vaccinated or not. What it means is that vaccination puts evolutionary pressure on the virus to become better at hiding from vaccine protection; infection similarly put evolutionary pressure on the virus to evade immune memory. That’s exactly what happened and continues to happen. The variants that are better at hiding from vaccine protection and from prior immunity through infection go on to become dominant. That’s why, even though you already had COVID 2 or 3 or 4 times, you’re going to get it yet again.

This is not a very sustainable approach to controlling a virus. The one component of this “strategy,” if you can call it that, that “protects” us from infection is…. infection. In other words, not everyone gets sick at the same time, but only because we’re all getting sick over and over again. The vaccine only-strategy relies on the infections and deaths of vulnerable people as part and parcel of this reinfection normalization to maintain an unsteady form of homeostasis with the virus. It’s this form of “balanced” coexistence with the virus that governments are now trying to incorrectly label “herd immunity”.

In the context of COVID, this new definition of “herd” simply means everyone has some degree of immunity from their previous infection, which will get topped up by their next infection. It is a strategy that not only produces forever reinfections, it is dependent upon forever reinfections. It not only doesn’t protect vulnerable people, it is dependent on harming and killing them. It not only can’t prevent reinfections, it incorporates continual reinfections as critical to its “success”. (Note: this decision to throw everyone under the bus of recurring infections has worsened, not ended, the unsustainable pressure on health systems globally).

I’ve spoken a lot about vulnerable people, but it’s inaccurate to frame the needs of vulnerable people as contrary to the needs of the rest of the public. This is a rhetorical and political trick the media has engaged in since Omicron wave one, when it became clear vulnerable people could not and would not be protected by vaccines alone. Instead of acknowledging that the “vaccine only” strategy was based on bad science and wouldn’t work to end the pandemic, the media persuaded “regular” people who have “nothing to fear” from COVID, to turn on “vulnerable” people, who very rudely won’t let us get back to normal because of their selfish desire to do stuff like keep being alive and not die.

Now, conservatives had always embraced this framing. From day one, Republican politicians and news organizations like FOX raged that we were all being held in a horrible state of captivity (wearing masks and not dining indoors) by the terrible, rude, selfish vulnerable people who should just go die. But Omicron was the point at which it became clear that the Democratic approach to protecting vulnerable people- vaccine-only- had failed. And it’s this point at which liberal outlets also began to subtly adopt this Republican framing. Suddenly it wasn’t, stay home to save a life, it was, well, stay home if you’re at risk. Suddenly it wasn’t my mask protects you, your mask protects me, it was “geez some people are really annoying about masks”. Collective health became personal risk assessment. The point at which COVID proved it would continue to evade our vaccines was the point at which liberals decided harming vulnerable people was ok, after all.

Breaking the solidarity that had arisen between members of the public- particularly liberals and those on the left with disabled people- required continual reframing of COVID as a problem that was over, that had become mild, and/or that couldn’t be controlled. It also involved reframing the most vulnerable- those we’d organized the COVID response to protect initially- as annoying, bad, possibly crazy, and definitely mean. We see that perception echoed everywhere today, even among leftists touting solidarity as the great principle of community organizing (which it is). Instead of engaging with real concerns about the safety of constantly reinfecting everybody with COVID- which, it should be clear, is not at all safe and inarguably awful for everybody’s health- people who don’t want to mitigate often go on the attack against vulnerable people, calling them names and mocking them. This is a weakness on the left that is being exploited to normalize unprecedented levels of illness among the entire public, not only the vulnerable.

Now, student absences are record high.

Whole economies are entering recession because of the unprecedented number of worker sick days.

And Long COVID continues to move formerly abled people into the vulnerable category.

Breaking solidarity will never, ever, put the left in a place of strength. Not when it comes to trans people, not when it comes to immigrants, not when it comes to disabled people. The media framed public health - the thing that protects vulnerable people, but also everyone- as contrary to the interests of the majority. In this case, those interests being “go back to normal,” and “pretend nothing is happening.” In reality, we all benefit from public health and disease mitigation. Just as welfare, and housing for the homeless, and raising the minimum wage is in the interest of everyone in society, so too is mitigating disease instead of letting it run rampant. The government has a responsibility to mitigate COVID by cleaning the air, just as it has a responsibility to mitigate cholera by cleaning the water. Instead, the media has people arguing on behalf of allowing viruses to spread freely. That is a coup of state propaganda, nothing less.

When people claim we are “in a different place” because of “the vaccines,” I know they have not engaged with the science around COVID since 2021. Vaccines that were initially thought to prevent infection and confer long-term immunity were found to be capable of neither. The virus mutated faster than expected, and updated vaccines continue to trail viral evolution by a year or more. The herd immunity strategy that Biden and the CDC openly pursued, failed and collapsed into a forever-reinfection nightmare.

Vaccines reduce the risk of death and severe outcomes- including Long COVID. We should all get boosted because it’s better for your vaccine protection to more closely match the genetics of the dominant variant. But “reduce” and “more closely” isn’t enough to get us back to normal when this virus is circulating at high levels year-round, reinfecting people within months, and leaving a devastating trail of disabling, long-term illness. We also now know that more COVID reinfections increase your cumulative risk of Long COVID; what, then, is going to happen to those “regular” people after 10 infections? 20?

The public needs to stop framing vulnerable people- people who are simply warning the public of the fate that awaits them after X number of reinfections- as the enemy. The enemy is the unmitigated spread of this virus that is continuing to produce vaccine-resistant variants we can’t possibly keep pace with. The enemy is the institutions that want to buy a feeble form of temporary immunity with our health and our lives. The enemy is the propaganda campaign that has everyone claiming, loudly and confidently, that COVID is over, while catching it for the fifth time in four years. The enemy is the utter destruction of public health for the sake of a normal that isn’t coming back.