And so the great state of Florida has decided against any vaccine mandates of any kind in either children or adults. What will happen? To figure that out, we need to travel back in time to December of 2014. At that time a person, never identified but presumed to have been in recent contact with a measles outbreak in the Phillipines, visited Disneyland, the so called happiest place on earth. That one person led to a chain of events that led to 131 cases in California, cases in six other US states, Mexico, and 159 sickened in a religious community in Canada. It was stamped out in April of 2015 through vigorous contact tracing and vaccination.
Florida is a state full of tourist attractions from Disney to Universal to the beaches to multiple cruise ship ports. All of these provide wonderful opportunities for strange biomes to meet and mingle and for highly contagious viruses to spread. We are already undervaccinated in this country due to the politicization of vaccine policy. In addition, the current administration is gleefully destroying public health infrastructure in the name of making America healthy again or some such. A significant drop in vaccine rates in a state, especially one like Florida where many come and go, will simply lead to higher and higher chances of epidemic infectious diseases that have been pretty much eliminated throughout our lifetimes again coming to the fore. It’s no longer going to be a question of if but rather of when. Perhaps Florida will be able to repurpose Alligator Alcatraz for children in iron lungs as that is where this is headed.
There’s a whole branch of mathematics and statistics that devotes itself to the prediction of events based on various probabilities. I wish I knew more about it as it would be useful information to have about now. However, given that this sort of research is likely politically verboten these days, don’t expect anyone to do the calculations. It’s the same folk who disprove conspiracy theories with mathematics. Elaborate conspiracies depend on tens of thousands of people holding silence. Human nature tells us that this never happens. Somebody always talks – pillow talk, an inadvertant slip while intoxicated, a deathbed confession. The larger the number of people that need to be involved, the less length of time a secret can be kept. Which is why I don’t buy into 9/11 was an inside job. With all of the people that would have had to be involved in rigging the towers and preparing the cover story, that secret couldn’t have been kept more than about three years.
Covid is still out there and is still a danger. Not like it was four or five years ago thanks to a combination of vaccines and natural immunity and viral mutation. But it can still make your life extremely unpleasant through long covid symptoms and it’s still killing people routinely. Am I going to continue to get Covid boosters? Yes. Those that are up to date in vaccinations are about 50% less likely to become infected and, if infected are about 70% less likely to require the ICU or die from the infection. They are also about 50-60% less likely to develop long covid symptoms after an infection. That’s good enough for me. I’ll let you make your own call. Most of us have opted not to continue vaccination. Only about 15% of the population got last year’s booster.
I’m about to launch back into an update of my Covid writings from 2020-2022. I haven’t yet figured out completely how to slant it. We’re sitting in a very different place culturally than we were when we were in the thick of the pandemic. There’s a piece of me that feels it needs to focus on lessons learned and how to be more prepared for the next pandemic which is becoming pretty inevitable with the current administration’s health policy. If Russia or China or India really wants to knock us off the world stage, sending some lethal viruses over should do the trick. Our society won’t be able to respond – other than with horse paste and injectable bleach.
I’ve had a request to write about what’s happening with senior housing given current cultural trends. I’ll try to gather my thoughts on that and maybe get to it later this weekend. My weekend is starting with a black tie gala. I hope it’s not the ball on the eve of the battle.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 