Omicron variant

William Barrett7 said:It’s just the usual—inflating the numbers to push boosters, vaccines, lockdowns, mandates, test results... basically whenever a specific variant starts losing its edge. It's easy enough to admit someone needs hospitalization just so they can lie in a bed and make the statistics look whatever they need them to be (whether that's "good" or "bad").

We'll find out pretty soon. Plenty of countries are finally moving past these waves driven by Delta. But honestly? It doesn't look great. If this thing manages to bypass the immunity we already built up naturally or through shots... we're screwed for at least another year or two.🎉

bluepuma9 said:We'll find out pretty soon. Plenty of countries are finally moving past these waves driven by Delta. But honestly? It doesn't look great. If this thing manages to bypass the immunity we already built up naturally or through shots... we're screwed for at least another year or two.🎉

What do you mean by "doesn't look great"? Mortality rates haven't actually shifted across the different variants—it's averaging under 2%, and if you look at the data coming out of the European Union, it's closer to 1% in some places. Can we please stop the fear-mongering and the panic?

William Barrett7 said:What do you mean by "doesn't look great"? Mortality rates haven't actually shifted across the different variants—it's averaging under 2%, and if you look at the data coming out of the European Union, it's closer to 1% in some places. Can we please stop the fear-mongering and the panic?

Mortality isn't the only thing on the table here.
What's the American healthcare system going to look like after another year or two of this epidemic? And if we zoom out to the bigger economic picture—and let's be real, Omicron probably isn't the final boss here—we've got much larger issues to deal with.

bluepuma9 said:Data coming out of Africa suggests there's a much higher chance of reinfection for people who already dealt with Omicron.

I just don't get it... If Omicron isn't supposed to be that dangerous or aggressive... then what's driving this latest surge in hospitalizations back in the States?

They're just talking nonsense when they claim it isn't dangerous.

When the British variant first hit, Lauc and the rest were claiming it was nothing to worry about.
Then when the even worse Delta arrived, Lauc, Bakić, and even plenty of doctors spent weeks insisting it would be mild.

We've been down this road before.
Initial reports almost always suggest a new variant is weaker.

Besides, it's summer in Africa right now.
Think back to how things went here in the US during the summers of 2020 and 2021. "Safe."
Then autumn rolls around and infections are everywhere again.

The reality is we have to wait until Omicron spreads through Europe and American doctors can compile the actual statistics on how infectious and dangerous it becomes here once winter hits.

William Barrett7 said:What do you mean by "doesn't look great"? Mortality rates haven't actually shifted across the different variants—it's averaging under 2%, and if you look at the data coming out of the European Union, it's closer to 1% in some places. Can we please stop the fear-mongering and the panic?

If mortality sits at 2%, then the math changes significantly depending on whether this new variant is more contagious than the last one.

If Delta infects a million Americans this winter, and the rate is 1% or 2%, you’re looking at 10,000 or 20,000 deaths.

But if a variant shows up with that same mortality rate, yet it's 50% more infectious and manages to bypass previous immunity, you end up with, say, 1.5 million infections by next winter and 15,000 to 30,000 dead.

The logic is simple: if mortality remains constant but transmissibility rises, you are back in the same mess.

Even if the new variant were somehow 30% less lethal, if it's 50% more infectious, you still end up with a higher body count by the end of the season compared to the previous strain.

Megan Harris said:If mortality sits at 2%, then the math changes significantly depending on whether this new variant is more contagious than the last one.

If Delta infects a million Americans this winter, and the rate is 1% or 2%, you’re looking at 10,000 or 20,000 deaths.

But if a variant shows up with that same mortality rate, yet it's 50% more infectious and manages to bypass previous immunity, you end up with, say, 1.5 million infections by next winter and 15,000 to 30,000 dead.

The logic is simple: if mortality remains constant but transmissibility rises, you are back in the same mess.

Even if the new variant were somehow 30% less lethal, if it's 50% more infectious, you still end up with a higher body count by the end of the season compared to the previous strain.

The whole "if this, then that" logic is a bit much. Transmissibility and mortality haven't shifted anywhere near the percentages you're suggesting or implying. Mortality for COVID-19 and all these newer variants has hovered around an average of 2% or less—and after nearly two full years, only about 15% of the American population has been officially infected. The reproduction factor is sitting somewhere between 0.88 and 1.1.

Everything else is just paranoia and fiction.☕

Simply pointing out how numbers can be manipulated isn't some paranoid conspiracy theory; it's just looking at the data.

Megan Harris said:If mortality sits at 2%, then the math changes significantly depending on whether this new variant is more contagious than the last one.

If Delta infects a million Americans this winter, and the rate is 1% or 2%, you’re looking at 10,000 or 20,000 deaths.

But if a variant shows up with that same mortality rate, yet it's 50% more infectious and manages to bypass previous immunity, you end up with, say, 1.5 million infections by next winter and 15,000 to 30,000 dead.

The logic is simple: if mortality remains constant but transmissibility rises, you are back in the same mess.

Even if the new variant were somehow 30% less lethal, if it's 50% more infectious, you still end up with a higher body count by the end of the season compared to the previous strain.

Has anyone actually seen a report of someone dying from Omicron? From what I've gathered so far, people aren't even ending up in the hospital; they just recover after a few days...
If that holds true, we might be looking at a unique window to finally end this pandemic. If Omicron can outcompete the other strains, specifically Delta, it could change everything. They are already pointing to the high mutation rate and predicting its rapid spread and eventual dominance.
The only catch is whether this forced terror and mass vaccination campaigns end up creating some kind of mutant monster—something experts were warning about nearly a year ago.

Look at the current situation in Japan. In just a few days, daily positive cases jumped by over 50%, moving from 83 cases and 1 death on December 1st to 130 cases and 2 deaths by December 3rd.

https://www.worldometers.info/corona...country/japan/

Nicholas Watson said:So, I just read that some person showed up at a massive concert over in Denmark carrying the Omicron variant

Honestly, those ultra-liberal folks over there are going to be the death of us with how much they love loosening up all the restrictions

You liberal Americans right now are actually tightening things up; their rules are way stricter than anything you'd see in fascist America.

William Barrett7 said:What do you mean by "doesn't look great"? Mortality rates haven't actually shifted across the different variants—it's averaging under 2%, and if you look at the data coming out of the European Union, it's closer to 1% in some places. Can we please stop the fear-mongering and the panic?

That just shows that the death rate per million unvaccinated people has actually climbed quite a bit.
Part of that mortality is honestly just a side effect of the sheer terror caused by all these vaccine conspiracy theories. But those theorists can't see the irony—they're the ones driving the panic. It's like what Cvorkovic said about how you can't actually see yourself without some kind of mirror to reflect things back.

William Barrett7 said:It’s honestly fascinating how nobody even mentions a potential cure or treatment as an option here; it's strictly mandatory vaccination, every single time.

You can only treat the critically ill, and the profit margins there are tiny. But you can vaccinate everyone, and you can do it repeatedly.

Ethan Gomez82 said:You can only treat the critically ill, and the profit margins there are tiny. But you can vaccinate everyone, and you can do it repeatedly.

Fine, walk me through how that actually works in practice:
1. First, a pharmaceutical giant develops a vaccine.
(Even though they, the governments, and the public all know cheaper therapeutic options exist.)
2. Then, that pharma company bribes every single politician on the planet to sign contracts for overpriced, inefficient vaccines—even when producing a better, cheaper drug would be easy.
3. And then, nations spend years clashing with their own citizens over vaccine mandates, risking civil unrest, riots, and losing upcoming elections or total political control.
That’s not even touching on the fact that national economies tank while bribed politicians bleed money on useless shots, waste billions on hospitalizations that could have been avoided, implement new lockdowns (bleeding trillions in lost revenue and stimulus), and watch tourism and manufacturing collapse globally.
Essentially, the whole world—politicians and citizens alike—ends up in the red. Why would they do that? For a kickback from Pfizer? Please.

Does that actually hold water for you?
You really only have two paths here:
1. A million conspiracy theories involving massive fraud, bribery, and lies just to make this logic work.
2. Or the simplest reality: they haven't found an effective enough cure yet, and vaccines are simply more efficient at scale.

Do I even need to bring up the Russians or the Chinese?
Are they also in bed with Pfizer to harass the rest of the globe?
They are perpetually positioned against America, the EU, and the West.
They would be the very first ones to expose the "truth" to the world if there were any substance to these top-down conspiracies.

For your little theories to make sense, eighty-six thousand unrelated variables would have to align perfectly into one singular global mafia targeting the average person.

Go Google Occam's razor.
In the vast majority of cases, the simplest explanation is the correct one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Honestly, you can find all kinds of idiots hanging out on this forum. 🙂

Developing high-efficacy antiviral drugs—especially respiratory ones—is a massive technical hurdle. That said, there’s actually some decent hope regarding COVID-19 based on preliminary data from experimental drug trials (if I remember correctly, it's Pfizer working on it again).
As for highly effective vaccines to prevent COVID-19 deaths, they already cleared all the research phases last year.

Ethan Gomez82 said:You can only treat the critically ill, and the profit margins there are tiny. But you can vaccinate everyone, and you can do it repeatedly.

At this current stage, however, those returns are quite underwhelming when measured against the broader market. Much like how certain tech stocks might lag behind the S&P 500, Pfizer and its pharmaceutical peers are currently underperforming the general index. It honestly feels as though even someone making decisions entirely at random would find more lucrative opportunities elsewhere right now.

I previously shared some charts on a different thread to illustrate this reasoning, so I won't dwell on the details here.

For Pfizer to truly dominate the landscape and extract massive profits from this situation, the crisis would need to persist for many years; they won't see sustained, overwhelming gains from just three or six months of activity, but perhaps if this drags on for several more years.

Megan Harris said:Fine, walk me through how that actually works in practice:
1. First, a pharmaceutical giant develops a vaccine.
(Even though they, the governments, and the public all know cheaper therapeutic options exist.)
2. Then, that pharma company bribes every single politician on the planet to sign contracts for overpriced, inefficient vaccines—even when producing a better, cheaper drug would be easy.
3. And then, nations spend years clashing with their own citizens over vaccine mandates, risking civil unrest, riots, and losing upcoming elections or total political control.
That’s not even touching on the fact that national economies tank while bribed politicians bleed money on useless shots, waste billions on hospitalizations that could have been avoided, implement new lockdowns (bleeding trillions in lost revenue and stimulus), and watch tourism and manufacturing collapse globally.
Essentially, the whole world—politicians and citizens alike—ends up in the red. Why would they do that? For a kickback from Pfizer? Please.

Does that actually hold water for you?
You really only have two paths here:
1. A million conspiracy theories involving massive fraud, bribery, and lies just to make this logic work.
2. Or the simplest reality: they haven't found an effective enough cure yet, and vaccines are simply more efficient at scale.

Do I even need to bring up the Russians or the Chinese?
Are they also in bed with Pfizer to harass the rest of the globe?
They are perpetually positioned against America, the EU, and the West.
They would be the very first ones to expose the "truth" to the world if there were any substance to these top-down conspiracies.

For your little theories to make sense, eighty-six thousand unrelated variables would have to align perfectly into one singular global mafia targeting the average person.

Go Google Occam's razor.
In the vast majority of cases, the simplest explanation is the correct one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

It’s not even about real conspiracies. It feels more like just scared people dealing with paranoid fears.

If they actually cared about exposing corruption, they'd be shouting about how hundreds of millions of dollars are being siphoned off through "creative accounting" during those new fighter jet purchases happening right now—it's getting wilder every day!

Has anyone even mentioned it? Any protests? Nope.
But if those Rafal jets were anything else, everyone would be out in the streets immediately.

So, I don't think they're uncovering conspiracies here. It seems more like they're just covering up their own insecurities and paranoia.

urbanwalker72 said:At this current stage, however, those returns are quite underwhelming when measured against the broader market. Much like how certain tech stocks might lag behind the S&P 500, Pfizer and its pharmaceutical peers are currently underperforming the general index. It honestly feels as though even someone making decisions entirely at random would find more lucrative opportunities elsewhere right now.

I previously shared some charts on a different thread to illustrate this reasoning, so I won't dwell on the details here.

For Pfizer to truly dominate the landscape and extract massive profits from this situation, the crisis would need to persist for many years; they won't see sustained, overwhelming gains from just three or six months of activity, but perhaps if this drags on for several more years.

Which is exactly why they keep announcing boosters indefinitely, isn't it?

Omicron has finally hit the States—we should get official confirmation tomorrow, but word on the street is it’s almost certainly a new variant.

Terry Hernandez10 said:Omicron has finally hit the States—we should get official confirmation tomorrow, but word on the street is it’s almost certainly a new variant.

Man, if only 🤣

Man, I finally picked up a Delta a few days ago... and ugh, what a total letdown.

Megan Harris said:Fine, walk me through how that actually works in practice:
1. First, a pharmaceutical giant develops a vaccine.
(Even though they, the governments, and the public all know cheaper therapeutic options exist.)
2. Then, that pharma company bribes every single politician on the planet to sign contracts for overpriced, inefficient vaccines—even when producing a better, cheaper drug would be easy.
3. And then, nations spend years clashing with their own citizens over vaccine mandates, risking civil unrest, riots, and losing upcoming elections or total political control.
That’s not even touching on the fact that national economies tank while bribed politicians bleed money on useless shots, waste billions on hospitalizations that could have been avoided, implement new lockdowns (bleeding trillions in lost revenue and stimulus), and watch tourism and manufacturing collapse globally.
Essentially, the whole world—politicians and citizens alike—ends up in the red. Why would they do that? For a kickback from Pfizer? Please.

Does that actually hold water for you?
You really only have two paths here:
1. A million conspiracy theories involving massive fraud, bribery, and lies just to make this logic work.
2. Or the simplest reality: they haven't found an effective enough cure yet, and vaccines are simply more efficient at scale.

Do I even need to bring up the Russians or the Chinese?
Are they also in bed with Pfizer to harass the rest of the globe?
They are perpetually positioned against America, the EU, and the West.
They would be the very first ones to expose the "truth" to the world if there were any substance to these top-down conspiracies.

For your little theories to make sense, eighty-six thousand unrelated variables would have to align perfectly into one singular global mafia targeting the average person.

Go Google Occam's razor.
In the vast majority of cases, the simplest explanation is the correct one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Why bother with bribery when they can just produce a vaccine and move on?
It’s simpler, cheaper, and the profit margins are excellent.
People will choose vaccination; after all, vaccines have historically been decisive in controlling numerous diseases.
From a business perspective, there is no real incentive to sink billions into uncertain drug development.
The idea that pharmaceutical giants would prioritize humanity's welfare over their own interests is frankly absurd.
Therefore, you don't need 86,000 variables; you only need one: pharmaceutical companies act in their own self-interest without worrying about the masses.