The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.
“If we don’t talk about it anymore, stop testing, stop taking statistics, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist and we can just focus on growth” —Corperate media funders, probably
Getting a flu + covid shot is free or nearly free for every American that has health insurance. It may be less convenient, but there are places to get a free flu and covid vaccines, if Americans do not have health insurance. Anecdote: This year, I had zero side effects from the shots besides a sore arm!
I think the government has a good handle on COVID-19 now with more-or-less mass vaccination, so it's not going to cause mass deaths and disabilities.
I'm more worried about H5N1 bird flu, more currently the affect it's having on milk and egg prices (over USD$12/doz. yikes!) and the potential to mutate to direct human-to-human transmission.
Overall, the mortality (death) rate for bird flu in humans is high — historically, about half of all people with known infections have died. But most recent cases in the U.S. have been mild.
Copying from my comment when you posted this on another community:
The issue is that it’s less severe, partially because people have immunity and partially because the virus is weaker (this happens with new illnesses - they get less fatal and spread more).
But wastewater isn’t newsworthy. It never has been. It’s disingenuous to say the media isn’t covering this when ERs are NOT having issues and people aren’t dying.
Many doesn’t the media have mass coverage of the common cold? Why don’t they cover norovirus? Endemic shit that doesn’t kill people isn’t really newsworthy.
Because its taboo, and some viewers/readers will scream about it (or at least disengage) just like they do for global warming.
It makes my skin crawl whenever I see our (Florida) weathermen bite their tongues when looking at, say, a graph of ocean heat content, and thats an order of magnitude worse on big, national, corporate media. COVID is no different.
They're silent because nobody, except for a handful of terminally online pandemic cosplayers care about it anymore, the rest of us have been living our lives normally for ~4 years now, despite your best efforts to drag us and the economy down by keeping us in pandemic mode for eternity.
Look, they don't make money by curing things. They make money when you have to take lifelong treatments to prevent the disease. The public isn't directly paying for COVID shots, except they are by paying taxes.
The pharma companies don't want people to be educated and taking preventative measures, they need more people to get COVID so that they can inspire others to fear getting it just enough to get the vaccine. Pharma pushes more units and the line goes up.
There's no money to be made in completely eliminating the disease, so they won't do that.
It'll matter once lil Donnie is in office again like before and they tally up the amount of Americans who died under his watch before he has a thought to do something about it. Like before.