Like the Marvel franchise, with its unlimited instalments and spin-offs, a new Covid scare campaign is underway in Australia.
Like the Marvel franchise, the entertainment content exists largely to create demand for merchandise.
Unlike most Marvel films, this latest virus fear-mongering drive is turning out to be a massive flop.
The hook: There’s a new ‘highly contagious’ Covid Omicron subvariant in town, catchily named NB.1.8.1.
Sticking with time-tested tradition, health authorities, experts and media are playing the ‘cases, cases, cases’ angle, as the latest variant “sweeps the nation” with what I calculate to be Australia’s 12th Covid wave since the pandemic scare series kicked off in 2020.
Exposition: “According to Griffith University, the NB.1.8.1 variant makes up more than 40% of total Covid cases tested in Victoria, around 25% in Western Australia and New South Wales, around 20% in Queensland and less than 10% in South Australia,” reports ABC.
“There are hundreds of different strains of Omicron, and the new subvariant NB.1.8.1 is driving up infections and hospitalisations, particularly in Asia and Western Australia,” reports the Daily Mail.
Narrator’s aside: Case counts and hospitalisations are well within the normal range in Western Australia (WA) and no one has been admitted to ICU with Covid for months, according to the latest WA Health reporting.
We’re not seeing anything out of the ordinary in national statistics either.
However, we mustn’t let this contextualising information get in the way of the narrative arc.
Climactic build up: Back to cases, cases, cases. It’s “pretty much everywhere,” according to ABC. “Doctors are expecting a further spike in cases,” so “experts are urging people to get their Covid booster jab”.
Endless vaccination is the only way out!
Climactic escalation: But experts are furious that Australians are not vaccinating enough. You naughty, naughty Australians. In the past six months, only 6.6% of adults have received a Covid vaccine, according to recent federal figures, despite the vaccines being ‘free’, i.e., already paid for with your taxes.
Crisis response: Our protagonist takes action to meet the threat head-on. After all, the Government has product to shift, so the vaccine advertorial must keep pumping.
Health Minister Mark Butler bravely does the media rounds, imploring anyone who can get a booster to “have a serious think” about following through.
Hero falters: Unfortunately for Butler, boosters aren’t recommended for many cohorts in Australia anymore, because the risk-benefit profile is not favourable for most people.
Current Australian guidelines suggest adults aged over 75 should get a booster every six months, while those aged between 65 and 74, along with severely immunocompromised adults over 18 years of age, should get one every year. Outside of this, boosters are not recommended but are available to all Australian adults and to children who are severely immunocompromised.
Plot twist: Experts admit that the reason everyone needs another booster is that vaccinating against a fast-mutating coronavirus doesn’t work super well.
“The virus gradually evolves so that some of its proteins are a little bit different so that it can avoid the antibodies that we’ve now got present at population level,” says one.
“In this case, we’ve got mutations in the spike protein that seem to be making it easier for this virus to attach to our cells and it seems to be making this virus evade our antibodies better,“ says another.
Flashback montage: Every expert who warned of immune imprinting, immune suppression, immune tolerance, the role of vaccines in driving new variants, vaccine-associated enhanced disease (VAEDs) and the general futility of vaccinating against respiratory viruses.
Slow roll a peer-reviewed article co-authored by Dr Anthony Fauci concluding that: “Durably protective vaccines against non-systemic mucosal respiratory viruses with high mortality rates have thus far eluded vaccine development efforts.”
Comic relief: Like the good lackeys they are, media outlets are beating up the BREAKING new variant story, to which the general public response has been LMAO.
An online Murdoch media poll indicates three-quarters of their readers just aren’t interested.
Denouement: Collective apathy. The failure of this latest scare campaign is unlikely to preclude a 13th scare campaign, as the Government is generally unresponsive to market feedback, and it has mRNA investments and purchase commitments driving its decision-making.
Media will continue to uncritically print Government press releases provided they convert to clicks – LMAO or otherwise.
Expect the next instalment just in time for the summer Covid wave.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnett’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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