Just As The World Relaxes, a New Variant Emerges

 WSWS's article talks about XBB.1.5, aka, "Kraken."

At the press briefing by the World Health Organization last week, lead scientist Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove called XBB.1.5 “the most transmissible Omicron subvariant detected yet.”

She added, “We do expect further waves of infection around the world, but that doesn’t have to translate into further waves of death because our countermeasures continue to work.” What this optimistic assertion conceals is that XBB.1.5 will lead to more infections and reinfections, these will inundate health systems, and people will die unnecessarily.

Additionally, allowing SARS-Cov-2 to continue its rampage unimpeded by any efforts on the part of national and international health agencies to bring the pandemic to an end means that the virus will continue to mutate genetically in ways that will enable it to bypass the current immunity built up in the population and potentially evolve into a more pathogenic form, making it deadlier and more virulent.  

XBB.1.5 was given the moniker “Kraken”—the name for the Norwegian mythological sea monster—by Dr. Ryan Gregory, a professor of biology from Canada, to distinguish the ever-growing complex designations of Omicron. As he noted in his December 28, 2022, Twitter post, “XBB.1.5 definitely earns a nickname with its record-setting growth advantage and both very high immune escape and ACE2 binding.”

Because COVID is no longer a useful political tool, and due to the justifiable belief that Big Pharma cares more about profit than the general health of the population, people will basically be on their own in dealing with this variant (and others) for the foreseeable future. The silver lining (if it can be called that) is that while "Kraken" is more immune-evasive, it is also likely "to cause milder illness compared to the Delta variants that predated Omicron."

In other words: everyone's going to get it, so the best option is to minimize the effects and reduce the chance of re-infection.