The Omicron variant

Photo by De an Sun on Unsplash

The naming of variant B.1.1.529 of the SAS-Cov-2 virus as “variant of concern” by the World Health Organisation, as a result of its increased transmissibility, has understandably dominated headlines for the last few days. Government reactions have been similarly swift, the UK government announcing a return to mandatory mask-wearing on public transport and PCR tests for arrivals from abroad. Public dismay, too, has been similarly and understandably swift to take hold.

I don’t blame anyone for a sense of despair, but we may - for now - be able to hold off on the misery. Omicron has a strikingly high number of mutations, with the potential, as a result, of it being more able to creep round the side of the vaccines we currently have available. There is a “reasonable chance” that the variant will have some degree of vaccine escape, as Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has said. But we don’t know this with any certainty as yet. And we might get lucky, for now.

For now. Given the extremely poor distribution of vaccines, and with a partially-immune global population being the ideal environment to encourage mutations, SARS-Cov-2 was always likely to produce more variants of concern for a long time before it reached endemicity. Having created a global economy almost primed to produce new variants, we are unlikely to remain lucky forever. (Imagine spinning a tombola repeatedly, and drawing numbers from it. The more spins you make, the more likely your numbers are to eventually come up.) If it isn’t Omicron, it remains likely that some other future VOC has significant vaccine escape.

What I’ve argued for a long time, and forming the core argument in the book – and therefore of this newsletter – is that covid-19 is not some trivial incident in the history of capitalism, but likely to be a decisive moment in its own mutation to a low growth, high cost, big state setting. There are two main reasons for thinking this:

1.     The biological features of the virus itself – its long incubation period, its high number of asymptomatic but infectious cases, and its (mostly) respiratory transmission – all make it extremely hard, if not outright impossible, to eliminate with our current technologies. Under conditions of competitive global capitalism, it becomes a near-impossibility, for the reasons I went through