Biden administration incompetence, "The Pandemic of the Vaccinated Is Here"

Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going 
to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID 
transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the 
Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to 
cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the 
patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden 
northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a 
new variant that appears better able to evade immunity, and that 
seasonal wave could end up a tsunami.

Back in July, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that 
COVID had become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” an 
unfortunate turn of phrase that was soon picked up by the 
president. Now the flaws in its logic are about to be exposed on 
what could be a terrifying scale. Unvaccinated Americans will 
certainly pay the steepest price in the months to come, but the 
risks appear to have grown for everyone. The pandemic of the 
vaccinated can no longer be denied.

The 60 percent of Americans who are fully vaccinated could soon 
find their lives looking very different. For much of the summer 
and fall, those who had received two Pfizer or Moderna doses or 
one Johnson & Johnson shot were told that they were essentially 
bulletproof, especially if they were young and healthy. But 
preliminary data from South Africa and Europe now suggest that 
two vaccine doses alone might still allow for frequent 
breakthrough infections and rapid spread of the disease—even if 
hospitalization and death remain unlikely. Getting three shots, 
or two shots plus a previous bout of COVID, seems to offer more 
protection. For Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute 
for Global Health, that’s enough evidence to justify changing 
the CDC’s definition of full vaccination. “With Omicron and the 
data emerging, I think there is no reason why we shouldn’t have 
a pretty strong push for everyone to have boosters,” he told me.

At this point, the CDC has recorded that less than a quarter of 
adults who are fully vaccinated under the existing definition 
have gotten a third shot. That leaves about 150 million people 
who are vaccinated but unboosted. Given that the people in this 
group are less protected against infection, they’re at greater 
risk of passing on the disease to unvaccinated or partially 
vaccinated kids, as well as to unvaccinated or immunologically 
vulnerable adults. They will also pass the coronavirus more 
readily among themselves. Settings that might have previously 
seemed safe for vaccinated folks—say, a restaurant or 
performance venue that strictly checks vaccination status—could 
become fertile ground for transmission, because the people 
inside them are more likely to catch and spread the virus. 
Indeed, anecdotal reports already suggest that large indoor 
gatherings of fully vaccinated people can become super-spreader 
events in the age of Omicron.

Population-level immunity could suffer in another way too, Omer 
said: People who were previously protected because of a prior 
infection could now be quite vulnerable to getting reinfected 
and passing on the disease. In fact, it’s possible that the only 
parts of the country where community transmission might be 
blunted are those that faced devastating early waves of the 
virus and subsequently had strong vaccination rates—mostly a 
handful of areas in the Northeast. “It’s really very, very 
challenging to consider how those differences might play out,” 
Joshua Schiffer, a disease-modeling expert at the Fred 
Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me.

Here’s the upshot: Each fully vaccinated person might still be 
at minimal risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID 
this winter, but the vestiges of normalcy around them could 
start to buckle or even break. In the worst-case scenario, 
highly vaccinated areas could also see “the kind of overwhelmed 
hospital systems that we saw back in 2020 with the early phase 
in Boston and New York City,” Samuel Scarpino, a network 
scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention 
Institute, told me. If only a small percentage of Omicron 
infections lead to hospitalization, the variant is still 
spreading with such ferocity that millions of people could need 
a bed.

Such a scenario would be especially dangerous if those millions 
of people all needed a bed at the same time. Omicron is so 
transmissible that cases could peak across the country more or 
less in tandem, Schiffer and Scarpino both said, which would 
make it harder for the U.S. to shuffle personnel and ventilators 
to particularly hard-hit regions. ICU capacities in some states 
are already stretched thin and health-care workers are resigning 
en masse, so the harms could be even worse. “If we don’t get 
serious, if we don’t get the masks on, if we don’t get testing 
up, we’re going to be back into lockdown again because people 
will be dying in the hallways of hospitals,” Scarpino said. The 
prospect of such a surge in hospitalizations is “keeping me up 
nights, to be honest,” Schiffer told me.

This all would be mitigated if Omicron turns out to cause 
significantly milder disease than Delta—still a possibility, but 
far from confirmed—and if the vaccines’ protection against 
severe disease holds strong. But even in that sunnier version of 
the future, cases are almost certain to increase in highly 
vaccinated areas and undervaccinated ones alike, and bring with 
them a host of disruptions to daily life. Schiffer suggested 
that in areas with sufficient political will—mostly highly 
vaccinated ones—high case rates could spur local leaders to 
institute new shutdowns. In any event, fully vaccinated people 
are still required to isolate for at least 10 days after a 
positive test, and anyone they’ve been in contact with might 
have to stay home from school or work. A positive test in a 
classroom could send dozens of kids into quarantine, and keep 
their parents out of work to care for them. Jon Zelner, an 
epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that 
massive disruptions caused by surging Omicron cases this winter 
could force Americans to reconsider these sorts of procedures.

Yadda yadda, let's all scream, "WE'RE CHICKENSHITS AND WE'RE 
GONNA DIE!"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/fully-
vaccinated-omicron-infections/620953/