The White House just announced that it would spend (waste/burn) $1.7 billion on chasing mutant and mutating strains of COVID-19 to “track and defeat emerging variants.”
Never mind that they haven’t been able to track even the original strain, which has now infected around half the US population. And never mind that the chances of defeating a virus are zero. At least President Biden is doing something right? Better to borrow and waste $1.7 billion than to never have borrowed and wasted it.
Here’s how it works.
The US government will spend a billion dollars on expanding genomic sequencing, including giving $240 million to the states to waste. The entire purpose of this billion is to be able to tell different strains and mutations from one another, see how they interact and spread, and hopefully find another bad mutant like the UK one. There’s no expectation of anything good or useful to come out of this. It’s for science.
$400 million will be invested in establishing six “centers of excellence” in epidemiology. This is important, because epidemiology hasn’t really been a thing in the past. Scientists studied viruses, bacteria, genetic conditions, and the brain — not very useful science when it comes to creating and managing pandemics.
So these new centers of excellence will provide all the science that’s needed for the next pandemic and we won’t have to rely on Google, YouTube, Twitter, and FaceBook to separate the good science from the bad science.
And as expected, the remaining $300 million will be spent on establishing a bioinformatics database to blah blah spin blah blah and add more information to the NSA’s massive database because Uncle Sam simply didn’t know enough about you.
The first program seems to have been created solely to support the centers of spin and the panic database. I expect it to work out quite well.
After all, COVID is mutating like there’s no tomorrow. As of May last year, a study had already found:
65776 variants with 5775 distinct variants, consisting of 2969 missense mutations, 1965 synonymous mutations, 484 mutations in the non-coding regions, 142 non-coding deletions, 100 in-frame deletions, 66 non-coding insertions, 36 stop-gained variants, 11 frameshift deletions and two in-frame insertions.
Takahiko Koyama a, Daniel Platt a & Laxmi Parida, Variant analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes
Yeah, it’s supposed to sound scary.
That was nearly a year ago. By now there should be at least 50 million variants, a million distinct variants and half a million mutations. At just $20 bucks a variant, it almost sounds worth spending the money.
In today’s world of trillion dollar packages, a billion doesn’t sound like much, which is why the administration gets away with this stuff.
Meanwhile, back in an almost parallel universe, the US spent $876 million in 2018 on Malaria control and research. Malaria. You know, the virus that kills 400,000 people a year with zero comorbidities. 400,000 non-American people. What a waste of $876 million. Who is going to get reelected bay saving foreigners from disease? Saving them from a dictator with drone strikes is one thing, but… seriously?
The good thing to know is that with six centers of plandemic excellence, the US and WHO should have a lot less work to do in frightening all the good citizens into cowering behind masks and shields when they trundle out the next virus.
The world needs a scare every few years. Let’s see. 2001 was 9/11. 2008-9 was the Global Financial Crisis and the last pandemic (remember H1N1?). It appears that the H1N1 was superfluous to requirements given the GFC.
Then we have 2019. So maybe another ten years? 2029. I doubt the great reset can wait that long.
