By Albion Hardon of The Lactator
Must we tear down our statues to Kent and Delta?
It seems that in our woke age every variant must be replaced by one that is more 'diverse'. I dare to ask why. Why must the unashamedly binary 'traditional' Delta variant be replaced by the clearly 'alternative' Nu? Does every European variant need replacing by one from Africa? It’s epidemiological correctness gone mad.
For all its naysayers, Delta was a good old fashioned, straight-up murderous variant. It wouldn’t sneak up on you and infect you when you had your back turned. No, it would look you squarely in the eyes and jump into your mouth. The simple fact is we didn’t know how lucky we were to be killed in our millions by the now unfashionably viro-normative Delta variant.
In my day, we’d just accept extreme difficulty breathing. We didn’t moan, we didn’t waste our dying breath asking for a fancy ventilator and a pat on the back. No. We sucked it up through our constrained tracheae and kept our stiff upper lips and dare I say it’s made us what we are today.
And what was wrong with the Kent variant? We could have called it quits and been satisfied with a homegrown Anglo-Saxon mutation that was the virological equivalent of the white cliffs of Dover. But no. Look where positive discrimination and quotas has got us.
That the virus now chooses to identify as "Nu", which isn't a thing, is a sad indictment of our supposedly pluralist, inclusive times.
And how would Delta react when it was caught fair and square by a vaccine? It would lay down its spike protein, shake hands and ruddy well move along. It was the World War One of COVID variants, it was COVID-1945 … It had a sense of fair play.
Delta had a good old fashion two-syllable name, it didn’t go around calling itself B.1.1.529 like one of Elon Musk’s mollycoddled offspring. OK, it was transmissible — but it wasn’t a desperate, attention-seeking influencer constantly bleating on Tik-Tok like Nu obviously is.
You don’t know what you've got until its gone. (Or until it's been correctly gene-sequenced).