I’m sick and came to the doctor to get tested for covid, strep, and flu, since those are going around my work. I asked the doctor if I could get paxlovid if the covid test was positive, and he goes “Oh I don’t think you’d need it”
Motherfucker almost everyone who catches covid should be fucking taking it wtf is wrong with you. Oh I’m young and otherwise healthy? Yeah and I’d like to fucking stay that way thank you very much, and I’ll take any reduction in the chance of becoming permanently disabled.
Also of the medical professionals I saw today, they were only wearing surgical masks, not N95s and I can’t comprehend it. Why in the hell would you go into the room of a likely covid case not wearing an N95 are you insane?
I’m so fucking sick of being the only person in this entire town that’s actually worried about catching this disease, even the fucking doctors don’t care anymore. I work in a research facility attached to a hospital and when I go to the food court and shit at best like 1/25 people are wearing masks. In a hospital.
Thank you Mr Joe Brandon for ending the pandemic, you’ve truly cemented your place among history’s greatest killers.
Fauci lied about the effectiveness of masks to preserve supply and turned half the US into anti-maskers, even though there's now a shitton of masks (with N-95s still being expensive instead of free like they should be). Pfizer could certainly maintain an artificial scarcity to jack up the Paxlovid price even more, but if more people are buying Paxlovid, they'll make more Paxlovid. It's pretty horrible that Pfizer has exclusivity to manufacture Paxlovid, and that exclusivity doesn't expire until 2041.
This is inaccurate. Getting COVID depletes your T-cells for 2 years if you don't take Paxlovid, young & healthy or not. So the first COVID infection will likely be less severe, but depleted T cells means that the 2nd infection, 3rd infection etc. will be more severe.
Also, "healthy" is misleading, because it implies that being physiologically healthy is sufficient to be able to raw-dog COVID and turn out okay anyway. Anecdotally, my young and physiologically healthy, vaccinated friend got COVID in summer 2022. Neurologically speaking, though, he's on the autism spectrum, has major depression, OCD, and Tourette syndrome, which makes him high risk for more severe symptoms. I pushed for him to get Paxlovid, but a family member in the medical field convinced him that Paxlovid was unnecessary, citing reasoning similar to what you suggested above. He got long COVID, has trouble thinking and focusing, and now, 14 months later, it hasn't gotten any better. He has to deal with long COVID from that single COVID infection for life, all because someone convinced him that a young, physiologically healthy, vaccinated person like him didn't need Paxlovid.
I think it is worse than that, in some ways. It is why I don’t really blame people for being anti-mask, or even mask ambivalent, even though a lot of them are just petit bourgeois and selfishly looking for their personal failings to be somehow vindicating. Fauci said that he was lying, and that it was to preserve masks for healthcare workers. But it is really unclear to me that he wasn’t just very completely wrong and saying that he lied in order to maintain a level of credibility. So, either way he is untrustworthy. People were right to be skeptical of his advice, but liberals ignored this and insisted on him being infallible. Questioning Fauci became its own political statement, and liberals identified it as reactionary.
But, the reality is that Fauci was highly inept and political and identifying his advice with “science” removed the capacity for the CDC to ever influence public behavior short of physical violence. If 50% of the country now looks at the CDC in an oppositional way, it is a collapse of credibility that renders the institution itself meaningless. It is the absolute worst outcome from a public health perspective, but another 50% of people still act as though he is good. They aren’t even bothered to see the damage it did and instead blame mostly working class people for being reactionary (when in reality, reactionaries were simply using selfish petit bourgeois impulses and mask-skepticism in an opportunistic way)
When Biden “rewarded” people who were vaccinated by ending mask mandates for them, but only working on an honor system, Fauci was parroting that shit even though there was no evidence it was a good idea, and socially it had the actual effect of ending the only pandemic measure they were willing to insist upon. It happened and then immediately we stepped into the delta wave. Liberals still became hostile when I pointed out it was Biden and Fauci making an objectively political decision that killed hundreds of thousands. That was when I realized that the Pandemic was “over” and that it had essentially become an unsolvable problem under our political-economy. Its why I basically just count my blessings that I survived and that there is little I could do.
Our social system failed, it is continuing to fail us all. Working people are mostly just responding to the material reality of that, and sometimes it is ugly. I think it just ticks off another box as to why the need to build a communist movement is an existential crisis in itself. I have given up on the pandemic in some ways, but I have become obsessed with organizing instead, because that is something that could resolve these contradictions, eventually. Anyway, sorry for the rant. I hate Fauci. I don’t get mad when people don’t wear masks. Most of the working class has been forced to contract it already by our social system, so it has caused most working class people to give up. Whether they understand it or not, they behave as if they have no control, probably because they unconsciously know they are subjects now. It is a manifestation of the callousness of capitalism and the dictatorship of bourgeois “democracy”.