Thread by @FreedomFriesInc

Fauci is absolutely right, as usual. Omicron (and/or future variants) can *potentially* cause a new wave regardless of season, but they might not. We will have to wait and see.

I'm grateful for (qualified, decent) Covid scientists around the world. If interested, read on...

I've already seen the far right fascist maga talking points that Omicron was somehow deliberately "released" in order to distract from political issues in the US.

>Eyeroll

I hate to break it to them but at the moment Covid began this was all set in train, naturally.

This pandemic is a natural disaster. Even if Covid was somehow manmade, it still would have evolved into variants, which is an ongoing natural process.

Working together so that poorer countries can vaccinate their people would hamper this natural process of mutating variants.

Sending vaccine products like Pfizer or Moderna would be of no use to poorer countries, because licensed providers such as nurses are needed to administer them.

The polio vaccine can be taken by mouth, making it possible to get their large populations vaccinated.

South Africa is about 24% Covid vaccinated. Ofc that makes the country ripe for developing variants like Omicron. Delta arose in India, a similarly (on average) underdeveloped country.

Both have a small population living in first world conditions among a very poor majority.

The half dozen or so Southern African neighbors of the Republic of South Africa are even worse off.

IMO there's no time to waste debating how this happened. It's in the interests of the US and others to help them all get vaccinated. It doesn't have to be with current vaccines.

Some of the current vaccines could be used to help in the poorest countries, and non-injectable Covid vaccines are being developed, too. It all takes time, though.

Biden has raised the possibility of waiving IP rights, which no doubt will alarm some. The devil is in the detail.

I will wait to see firm proposals of how investor rights would be balanced against the right to life. Both are enshrined in the US Constitution.

American lives are threatened by a natural disaster that worsens their risk level by evolving variants in less vaccinated countries.

Real life politics is full of trade-offs and nuance and complex calculations. We each have the choice between admitting that or pretending we can make the complex simple.

There may be ways to get this balance right. The alternative, doing nothing, is not an option right now.

Although I'm a free market conservative, I readily acknowledge that during WWI & WWII it was necessary to be on a war footing & make decisions based on the emergency situation that fell upon us.

All our governments did this, including the US & the UK. There was no alternative.

The facts about this pandemic mean it's an emergency on the level of those wars. It will become the defining global event of our lives, like the two wars did.

Helping get poorer countries vaxxed is not just a humanitarian thing; it can hasten the end of the pandemic for us.

First world economic resources are not limited. New research is starting to show that Germans supported Nazism partly because of a view that the world's resources are limited. 90 years later the explosion in technology has made that view even more wrong.

Whether I like Biden or not, I do trust him to make better pandemic response decisions than his predecessor did. He doesn't act alone; he seeks out the credible scientific advice available to him. He gets out of their way.

Thank heavens for that.🇺🇸💙💜