Pieter de Beer,
I am really sorry your full reply was lost. I would have read it with great interest. I WILL read it with great interest when it is recovered/redone. The listed points (facets) look very much to the point about what is happening. I will start with the text/data loss issue and then talk about some of your points briefly.
I have had similar text/data losses while blogging – lots of data, lots of links, lots of exposition. I understand the frustration. There’s something about being hot on the trail of an important topic that makes us forget to do back ups. I have learned to stop when I feel I have already written quite a lot in a blog window. I go back, highlight and copy it, so at least it is on the “clipboard” in memory. Then I open my word processor and a document I keep for such purposes, paste it in there and save. It’s just a few window flips. Also, in some blogs, the lost text can be recovered by just using the browser back arrow to go back from the attempted post to the draft window. Often, the text is still there in the draft window. Even if you closed the window tab you can get the window tab back on many browsers with the correct command. I’ve even had crashes due to power outages, lost huge screeds of text and later when rebooting and re-opening windows for the word processor and the blog site, found that recovered windows come up with all my text. Some modern proprietary operating systems (naming no names) are now automatically backing up in background, all the time seemingly. That can mean the full text is still somewhere on the hard drive, in temp files I guess. One just has to find them, maybe. Best to go looking early, not late of course.
Re your five points, I will start by talking about points 1 and 5. Of course, I don’t know what you were looking at in those points but they are my first interest along with the interplay between them.
We notice the general disinterest, even the strong opposition, of capitalists to public preventative measures, especially NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and lock-downs. Their interest is only in pharmaceutical prevention or amelioration. There is relatively little money to be made in many forms of NPI and physical distance prevention. Masks are low tech (read low profits) and people staying distanced spend no money at all doing that and may even spend less money overall. Indeed, there are often money losses in prevention. People isolate, businesses lose workers, draw less customers and even shut down.
The cordon sanitaire, once a staple of epidemic control, and still used sensibly for a while by some capitalist countries like Australia, has been declared (essentially) inconsistent with capitalism. The cordon sanitaire (isolation, lock-downs) has been cast, in populist terms, as something other than the population willingly protecting itself, complying with democratic directives for public safety from its elected government and doing so out of both enlightened self-interest and community concern. Instead such measures are cast as anti-freedom interventions by “socialists” or suchlike. It turns out that one should not interfere with important capitalist and consumer freedoms, like the freedom to make money while people die preventable deaths or the freedom of the robust to behave and consume in ways which spread the epidemic to the more vulnerable. “My freedoms don’t end where your feelings begin,” is the standard saw of the libertarian right. Never mind that any idiosyncratic construction of personal freedom (a form of solipsistic selfishness and license) is itself entirely based on feelings of self-righteousness and self-entitlement.
Essentially, public health measures which do not permit corporations to make huge profits are declared out of bounds, precisely because they are inconsistent with dominant capital interests. The trouble with cordons, aside from obstructing the profits of dominant capital, is that they can be implemented directly by the people, not just by government edicts and security forces. They can be a people power phenomenon. In formal politics, a cordon sanitaire is the refusal to cooperate with certain political parties. But a union picket line is a direct action cordon. A rent strike is also a kind of cordon (between poor people’s money for necessities and the slumlord’s claim for rents). Overall , the people must be kept atomistically selfish, mutually antagonistic in detail. Coalescence around cooperative goals is anathema to capital.
The strategy to stay completely open (for the circuits of money, capital and manipulated workers and consumers) and to rely almost entirely on vaccination is a strategy which takes no cognizance of the powers and subtleties of the phenomenon of evolution. SARS_Cov_2 as an RNA virus can mutate relatively rapidly compared to many other pathogens (but not compared to some other RNA viruses as coronaviruses actually have a proofing capacity to reduce mistakes or mutations). SARS_Cov_2 as seen in Omicron also appears to have to have devloped a splicing capacity to splice sections of at least two variants infecting the one person. Overall, as a zoonotic virus newly infecting humans, SARS_Cov_2 now represents an instance of punctuated equilibrium evolution where evolution of the new pathogen (in this case) is extraordinarily rapid.
The continued assumption of the public and the élites is that the virus is a (nearly) stationary target. It’s actually a rapidly evolving and moving target. To rely only on or mainly on vaccination is to condemn ourselves to always ceding the initiative to the virus. It makes the move each time (evolution to a new, confoundingly dangerous variant) and then we play catch-up trying to make a variant specific booster, taking at least four months to get that variant booster into public arms. Only prevention, suppression and eradication can wrest the initiative back from the virus, reducing and then preventing mutation by reducing and then preventing replication.
The public and the elites (not the virologists and epidemiologists) have profoundly misunderstood the nature of coronaviruses in general and SARS_Cov_2 in particular. Lasting and complete immunity was never going to occur due to the nature of the virus. It’s a characteristic of the genus that immunity wanes relatively rapidly in the face of viral mutation and the the loss of “immune memory”. Vaccinations were never going to be anything but “leaky”, permitting reinfection albeit usually with lessened symptoms and danger. Why were these realities denied from the outset and the public fed with a set of myths about these issues? Your five facets certainly can support an analysis going to the heart of those issues. I will write more shortly when I get time.