“I nonseriously wondered if some mad scientist engineered Omicron and released it to inoculate the world. Because, it is so mild, so much less severe on the lower respiratory system, so much more infectious, and seems to out compete all other variants of Covid while granting immunity to them as well. By everything I hear and read, yeah, it’s Covid. But it’s not the Covid we were taught to fear, where overnight your lungs get shredded and you drown in your own diseased fluids.

Of course, actually doing that on purpose were be insanely unethical. But I can also imagine a mad scientist so fed up with feckless bureaucrats and greedy pharma execs that he or she does it anyways, because it’s what they can do and it beats leaving it to the idiots or the assholes. “