The COVID Booster Gap

Loyal readers will remember that, ever since January 2021, I’ve considered the Vietnam War to be the best analogy to American efforts in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 (see Lockdown is our Vietnam War so it will end gradually? and Vietnam War analogy for COVID-19 holding up?). As bad an idea as the Vietnam War might have been, from an economic point of view, this comparison is unfair to the folks who supported the Vietnam War for 15 years because coronapanic spending in the U.S. has been roughly 2X the cost of all U.S. wars combined and vastly more than what the U.S. spent on the Vietnam War (the spending on which was blamed for the massive inflation of the 1970s).

“COVID booster gap traps millions of Americans” (Axios) brings in something that I haven’t seen before: Cold War language. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR’s missiles in comparison with those of the U.S. (a lack of military parity). The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR’s weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional.

John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was apprised of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he knew it. There has been some speculation that he was aware of the illusory nature of the missile gap from the start and that he was using it solely as a political tool, an example of policy by press release.

Look at the suffering reflected in the chart below. Fully 58 million of our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters have had two vaccine shots, but are not eligible for the emergency use authorized sacrament of boosting.

The Axios article quotes someone who seems unsuited to leadership in the American public health priesthood:

“The question is, what is the goal of this vaccine?” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.