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’Tis the Season for Covid Silliness
The pessimist complains about the wind;
the optimist expects it to change;
the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward
An emerg doc, a dermatologist, and an evolutionary biologist walk into a bar.
That’s not the opening to a bad joke. The protagonists are real. Except they didn’t walk into a bar: they blundered instead onto the op-ed page of The Calgary Herald earlier this month.
And the nonsense they deposited certainly reads like a lousy joke.
The headline captures the tone:
“We don’t know what’s causing the tsunami of sick kids, but we’d better figure it out fast.”
The authors — Joe Vipond, Lisa Iannattone, and T. Ryan Gregory — are seasoned Covidians, a joyless threesome who’ve used the pandemic crisis to create influential Twitter platforms, pulpits from which they relentlessly preach Covid gloom-and-doom to their legions of adherents.
Their latest sermonizing — regurgitated in the Herald piece — peddles the invented concept of “immunity theft” as explanation for the enormous spike in RSV and influenza infections plaguing our children.
In a nutshell, by the lights of these three, the spike is Covid’s fault. And…