Is It Time to Change Course on Covid? | William Eden

What are we getting wrong with Covid, and what does it mean to adapt to it becoming an endemic disease? William Eden is a biotech and healthcare investor who has been paying close attention to the progress of the pandemic from many different angles. He recently posted a viral Twitter thread on the topic: https://twitter.com/WilliamAEden/stat...

In this conversation with Rebel Wisdom's David Fuller they cover how the pandemic became politicised, how the authorities have been slow to adapt, and how the mandates are likely to backfire.

Here's the tweet thread:

I figure it’s worth posting a summary thread about my current thoughts on COVID to refer back to: Like many great blunders in history, we went into this without an exit plan. The landscape has changed such that risk is now individual cost/benefit more than public health. 

I was fully on board with early COVID Zero attempts. Containing and eliminating this virus, like we did with SARS1, would have been an enormous boon to the world. But the extremely anemic response in the entire world outside of Asia and Oceania guaranteed failure.

The fallback plan was red/green zones with local containment, lots of quarantine when moving between them, contact tracing, etc. De facto we got a few jurisdictions with this system, but I hoped it could work in many more countries. But that ship has also sailed now. 

The pandemic has now become endemic. The authorities seem to not have acknowledged this fact, despite it being blatantly evident. Doing so changes the optimal policy. This is where the lack of exit strategy is getting ugly… 

One potential exit path was vaccines. The initial efficacy was way better than I hoped! It seemed like maybe there was a promise (implicit or explicit) that getting mass adoption would stop the pandemic and/or return things to normal 

Unfortunately the biology of COVID is such that it’s like their distant cousins, the four endemic human coronaviruses that circulate and cause seasonal common colds. Immunity fades and you can catch each one annually. This is the future of COVID, forever. Face it. 

On the flip side: it sure looks like immunity (from vaccines or infections) confers a very significant protection against *very severe* COVID outcomes, long after it stops preventing infections and transmission. This is a great thing! And changes the risk calculus. 

The original justification for mass vaccination was that you could halt COVID spread, including to the people who couldn’t receive a vaccine. This makes some sense as a basis for policy! But it turned out to be false. 

If you get vaccinated, you are protecting *yourself* from the worst of COVID, but you aren’t protecting others for more than a few months. This makes it an *individual* decision, and NOT in the domain of public health policy. 

Similarly, masks do seem to offer some protection to both the wearer and others around them - but we can already individually choose to wear masks (including P100s or Versaflows or other measures) and get vaccinated. Anyone who wishes can protect themselves from COVID. 

The current policy seems to recognize *only benefits and not costs* of public health interventions. But there’s both direct costs, and costs to the fabric of society. Everyone knows our civilization is in a fragile state. We must not tear ourselves apart. 

Take vaccine mandates for example. They will likely succeed in pressuring people against their will to raise vaccination rates a few %. At the cost of **politicizing vaccines forever** and creating an unemployable undercaste of society. Surely they didn’t run the calculation. 

There are conceivably situations where this is warranted - a disease which doesn’t mutate rapidly, has severe illness, and immunity is lifelong. And in some cases it could be worth non-pharmaceutical interventions to slow the spread while deploying a vaccine! 

Furthermore, risk is reduced even more by the emergence of effective treatment options, from repurposed drugs easier on to Paxlovid today. With COVID becoming endemic and seasonal we need to deploy these - and continue working on even better options. 

At this point, COVID is over when we decide it’s over. And there’s no justification for continuing emergency measures and heavy handed policy when the risks have become manageable, and almost entirely individual, when it is literally tearing apart our society. 

If I were named COVID czar tomorrow:
-all pandemic restrictions and mandates ended immediately
-an impassioned plea to consider vaccination
-redirect resources to scaling therapeutics and developing better drugs and vaccines
-take any measures you need to protect yourself 

- William Eden

Health   Media Literacy   Politics
Rate this video 
Health
Positive Alternatives to Business as Usual
How We Got Here: Documentaries That Explain Why Corporate Media Is the Crisis
Trending Videos
Jordan Klepper Charts Trump's Long History with Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell
13 min - With MAGA and Democrats demanding answers about the Epstein files and Trump denying their existence, Jordan Klepper charts the presidents well-documented history with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine...
acTVism Munich Video Series
272 min - This video playlist compiles all of acTVism Munich's work that include a wide range of topics - privacy, democracy, economy, politics and social issues.
Chicago 10 (2008)
98 min - Protesters and activists in the face of an oppressive and armed government speak out and take a stand, and after being denied permits for demonstrations they repeatedly clashed with the Chicago...
Food, Inc. 2 (2024) ($7)
94 min - In Food, Inc. 2, the sequel to the 2008 Oscar-nominated and Emmy-award winning documentary, Food, Inc., filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo reunite with investigative authors Michael...
Food Fight: How Corporations Ruined Food (2012)
72 min - When we walk into a supermarket, we assume that we have the widest possible choice of healthy foods. But in fact, over the course of the 20th century, our food system was co-opted by corporate...
Why Labour REALLY Supports Genocide
13 min - Labour Friends of Genocide EXPOSEDJoin the Future of Journalism: https://www.patreon.com/DoubleDownNews
Permaculture
Can You See It?
Subscribe for $5/mo to Watch over 50 Patron-Exclusive Films
Subscribe $5/mo View All Patron Films

 

Your support keeps us ad-free and financially independent

Our 10,000+ video & article library is 99% free, ad-free, and entirely community-funded thanks to our patron subscribers!


Want to double your impact? You can subscribe for $10/mo or more as an extra show of support.