COVID Confusions

 

COVID-19 is a new acronym coined for Corona-Virus-Induced-Disease of the year 2019. Year 2020 made some old word or phrases suddenly very fashionable and buzzing with new meanings, and injected them into active vocabulary of people. Corona, a word hitherto associated with the Sun, novelty and SARS-Coronavirus-1 was not so much in use but became suddenly a dreaded word linked to COVID-19. Positivity, a word that was generally used for the practice of being or tendency to be positive or optimistic in attitude up until then, took on the other meaning of the presence rather than absence of a certain substance, condition, or feature, now a measure of incidence of disease.

 

Check out some of these words or phrases for yourself, because your inability to use them in conversations may be mistaken as your ignorance – animal-human interface, asymptomatic, carrier, clinical trials, community spread, contact tracing, Contagious, Droplets, Epidemic, flatten the curve, herd immunity, HRCT scan, incubation period, Isolation, Mask, mRNA Vaccines, Mutant, Outbreak, Oxygen-concentrator, Oximeter, Pandemic, Pathogen, patient zero, PCR test, personal protective equipment (PPE), Plasma, Quarantine, Rapid-Antigen Test, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), Screening, self-isolate, social distancing, Super spreader, Symptomatic, Transmission, Vax, Ventilator, Viral Vector Vaccines, Zoonotic – and the list goes on.

 

Some proper nouns also made their way in the active vocabulary – Wuhan, AstraZeneca, Covax, Covaxin, Covishield, Sputnik5, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen, Novavax, Coronil, CoviSelf, Remdesivir, 2-DG, and so on; but the most conspicuous proper noun is FAUCI.

 

Anthony Stephen FAUCI (born December 24, 1940) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who serves as the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to the president. He has acted as an advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world's most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals. In the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, The New Yorker and The New York Times described Fauci as one of the most trusted medical figures in the United States. Currently Fauci is the Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden, officially appointed in 2021.

 

After initially declaring in April of last year that the virus was “not a major threat to the people of the United States” and that it was “not something the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about,” Fauci repeatedly urged Americans not to wear masks early in the pandemic. Later, Fauci admitted that he had believed all along that masks were effective but said he had wanted to ensure that supplies would be reserved for medical professionals. In other words, he asserted that he had the right to lie to the public for what he believed to be their own benefit. If Fauci is correct that masks effectively contain the spread, then the cost of his misinformation as the pandemic worsened may be incalculably large, for the US community. (https://www.delcotimes.com/opinion/chris-freind-dr-fauci-needs-a-dose-of-reality/article_9bce984e-7641-11eb-8c87-4f0114a8a7a2.html )

 

After repeatedly dismissing the theory that the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, Fauci now says he cannot rule out the theory.

 

Fauci has now backtracked on his comments about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for the Chinese lab under his leadership, that funding was not for “gain of function” research, a laboratory technique that intentionally makes pathogens more dangerous and transmissible. Gain of function research in Wuhan was indeed funded through one of Fauci’s grants.

 

Late last week, COVID policies stated that fully vaccinated individuals do not need to wear masks indoors or outdoors, any longer. Defending the policy, Fauci declared that the abolition of mask mandates was not a contradiction of previous policy but instead followed “evolving science” on the virus; although no examples of this supposedly new scientific evidence were forthcoming. Fauci then added to the confusion by declaring, apparently on his own authority, that young children would still be required to wear masks in school. Then, just a gay later, Fauci suggested that it was “reasonable” for businesses to maintain mask mandates even for vaccinated Americans, in blatant defiance of the CDC’s recent guidance. Whichever way one looks at it, Fauci has become a key player in the current controversy, which completes his transformation from an independent doctor into a political football, at the age of 80 years.

 

Fauci has also steadily moved the goalposts on the percentage of the population that will need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. Earlier this year, he said herd immunity would be achieved when 60% were vaccinated; in recent interviews, he has spewed out numbers as high as 85%. At the very least, the top infectious diseases expert of the US and chief medical adviser to Biden is loose with the facts and is prone to changing his mind. To be fair, the pandemic caught a lot of people unaware, but the thing about Fauci is that he always is so sure of himself. (https://nypost.com/2021/01/24/dr-fauci-needs-to-be-held-responsible-for-mistakes-devine/ ).

 

India has done well in vaccinating the armed forces personnel with 90% of them having already received both doses of vaccine. India did not listen to the US guidelines (CDC) on reopening of schools, which is now being associated with untold misery that followed in Texas.

 

Luckily, Indian policy-makers do listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci but do not blindly subscribe to all his utterances. Good, is not it, that while being open to all the information, suggestions, knowledge and advice coming from everywhere, we have a mind of our own. When it comes to inconsistent and improvisational COVID messaging, no one can surpass Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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First published 24 May 21

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