On Politics, War by Other Means — 06

“Grooming” is real. Trumpublican voters are being groomed to believe that the coming Climate Shock is “natural”.

An examination of a disinformation campaign.

I am mostly a Climate Change writer. But when the pandemic started, Covid was all that I wrote about.

As an analyst I thought I did pretty well. In my sixth month report on the virus in July 2020 (We have reached the end of the Beginning - A Review of what we know), I only got one thing wrong. I was adamant that there wasn’t going to be a vaccine that year.

I didn’t know that there was a large pre-existing body of research on a vaccine for a SARS virus. I had forgotten about the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003–2004.

It’s easy to forget about that one because it was contained. Globally, only 8,096 people got infected. It was a blip on most people’s radar.

If you were an epidemiologist, it was a screaming red alert. Because the Infection Mortality Rate (IMR) was 9.5%. Of the 8,096 who got infected, 774 died.

By comparison, the IMR for SARS-CoV-2, or Covid-19, is just over 1%.

So, when SARS happened it got a lot of attention. No one in their right mind wants to see a pandemic like Covid, but with a 10% mortality rate. So, there was money put into vaccine research.

Not a lot. Tiny amounts. The amounts that fund small research projects, in the small number of places capable of doing vaccine research on a virus as dangerous as SARS-CoV-1. The small steady amounts that drive government funded research yet have great power. Because, over time, they add up and produce results.

About 80% of the research needed to produce the Covid vaccine had already been done when the pandemic hit.

They did this basic “not for profit” research so that we would be ready if another round of SARS showed up. Because the next version might be even more lethal.

We dodged a bullet the first time. They wanted to be sure that the next time a SARS virus came around, we were ready.