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Boostered as of today. If I don't start walking up walls and having the proportional strength of a spider by tomorrow I will be *highly* disappointed...
Yesterday, the world seemed to go instantaneously crazy over the "nu" variant. I think what triggered it was that European countries like the UK and Germany announced bans on travel from southern Africa. Now the entire EU is considering following suit. It was thus headline news on the BBC. Starting late last night it became "breaking news" on CNN with multiple "breaking news" events in one news segment. World markets traded down overnight. The DOW is down 1000 pts right now.The world is still very shaky. This variant wasn't found until 2 weeks ago. There have only been a 10's of cases found worldwide. Delta was a concern for weeks and much more widespread before the world seem to respond this way. This is so new that it hasn't even been assigned a name yet, it's just assumed that it will be "nu". The reason the world is reacting this way is the number of mutations is large with this variant. So the concern is that it may evade the vaccines at least to a degree. But there's a reason that most people have only heard of alpha and delta although we are up to "nu". It's because the other variants died out. Hopefully this one will die out as well.Update: The powers that be have met and have name this variant "omicron". I guess "nu" was already taken. Colloquially it's already being called the "Thanksgiving variant". They also classified it as a VOC skipping over classifying it as a VOI first.
The Omicron variant is a reminder to all developed nations regarding vaccine inequities. Developing nations have a much lower vaccination rate and that is where many of the variants are coming from. This renews the debate over how much the developed world should help developing nations as far as getting people in poorer nations vaccinated.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login
ABSOLUTELY! We are seeing a serious, deadly issue being compounded significantly because of sheer capitalism. Drug companies not wanting to share the formula for the vaccine w/underdeveloped companies means said countries don't have a robust vaccination system in place. I read Africa has, like a 30ish% vaccination rate which only allows the virus to mutate more and more until it potentially out-powers the vaccination.I honestly don't know what the solution is. I know USA has sent vaccines to other countries, but statistically speaking that's just a drop in the bucket population density-wise.