You know me, I’m down with XBB
Ok, well, not yet, and hopefully never
Faster than the spread of Omicron! More powerful than a warp-speed vaccine! Able to evade tall orders of monoclonal antibodies in a single bound! It’s a cold! It’s the flu! No - it’s XBB - the newest Covid sub-variant! That’s right, just in time for flu season (and election season), there is a new Covid sub-variant, referred to as XBB. If you read the Daily Beast, it just might have you shaking in your winter boots. According to the Beast:
A new subvariant of the novel-coronavirus called XBB dramatically announced itself earlier this week, in Singapore. New COVID-19 cases more than doubled in a day, from 4,700 on Monday to 11,700 on Tuesday—and XBB is almost certainly why. The same subvariant just appeared in Hong Kong, too.
A highly mutated descendant of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that drove a record wave of infections starting around a year ago, XBB is in many ways the worst form of the virus so far. It’s more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments.
Everyone run for shelter! Sound the alarms! How is the Daily Beast still operating? Aren’t all their employees seeking shelter from the coming…pan…er…uhh…epi….um…. hmmmm…. what’s coming again? Oh, yes. Flu/election season. We must trust them. After all, they are getting their information from the infamous…I mean, trusted, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security:
“It is likely the most immune-evasive and poses problems for current monoclonal antibody-based treatments and prevention strategy,” Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.
And everyone knows, Johns Hopkins is a reputable school and could never be compromised. Paging the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Medicine to the white courtesy phone. We need some input on a new variant and potential strategies to defeat it.
But there is good news…well, for big pharma anyway…
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the new “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Pfizer and Moderna seem to work just fine against XBB, even though the original vaccines are less effective against XBB…
“Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most—severe disease—remains intact,” Adalja said.
Well, that settles that. We all just need to run out and get our boosters. I mean, the original shots aren’t so effective against the new strain, but surely we can trust the improved injection. I bet it’ll stop transmission too! Or, did they test for that? Hmmm….
Still, it will be much worse if you don’t take the shots. This XBB is a beast, and it has friends!
What is surprising is how much competition XBB has as it fights to become the next dominant form of the novel-coronavirus. Several other Omicron subvariants are also in circulation. All of them are highly evolved.
Isn’t it rather convenient that this is happening just weeks before the midterm elections? And also at a time when big pharma stocks have been dropping as fast as the demand for their vile vials?
Run for shelter if you choose, or to your nearest Walgreens to get your free poison poke. Or, better yet, just go about your lives as though nothing was happening, because you don’t want to swallow a single bite of this big nothing burger - it’ll just give you heartburn (or myocarditis).
If this weren’t true it actually would be pretty funny!!
Good grief. Here we go again with the fear mongering BS. I will NOT take ANY jab of ANY sort that they claim to be the answer to the problem THEY CREATED in the first place. IF I get it I will take my chances.
I wonder if they will now allow doctors to prescibe hydroxy chloroquine finally or are they still against it because they still hate Trump sooooo much?