Covid-2019 - 2022-07-08

Read the sub-headline in a "Recommended Reading" story today from the New York Times, explaining how new variants "power a surge of known infections in Europe."  Here it is: "While many European countries have seen an uptick in hospitalizations, 'what we’re not seeing is an increase in intensive care unit admissions, so the vaccines are still very much working,' an official with the World Health Organization said this week." So now the official story is that "working" means you don't end up on a ventilator. Can we all be honest enough with ourselves to admit that the explicit promise as recently as a year ago was that the vaccines would protect you from infection in the first place? No wonder, elsewhere in the Times today, a story points to a Pew survey about how the pandemic has eroded trust in institutions. No, the pandemic didn't do that. The institutions did that.