Soup to nuts, I’m more concerned about COVID today than I’ve been at any point in the past year. I don’t think it’ll be a horror show soon, not like it was before, but we haven’t (yet!) put ourselves in a position to get ahead of a virus whose entire job is to find ways around our defenses, and now it’s doing just that.

My usual caveats:

• I’m not a virologist
• I’m not an MD
• I’m not an epidemiologist
• I’m not a sociologist
• I’m not a policy maker
• I’m not a journalist
• I’m not a cat

I am: A former liberal arts major with a popular and critically acclaimed newsletter and a podcast, and I’ve spent the past few years trying to learn about the world’s most complex problems from a broad array of incredibly smart, capable, and thoughtful folks to understand where we are, why we’re here, where we might be going, and what the hell you and I can do about it all.

I’ve covered the broader shifts of COVID every week in this newsletter, standing on the shoulders of some of the most incredible journalism we've ever seen.

And here are the facts on the ground:

Because of a huge, overlapping variety of societal and institutional failures, our bodies and health system, however immunized, are under assault from an increasingly wide variety of subvariants of our own making.

We have chosen not to vaccinate the world, and at home, we have almost completely let our guard down, relying on a population whose existing vaccines are becoming less potent every day and who are reluctant to get any additional new ones, no matter how capable.

Today I want to elaborate on these factors, and help you understand where I think we are, where we might be going, and why, and what we can do about it. While historically our “numbers” remain low (and that’s great!), there’s a very good chance the variants keep evolving to feature better immunity evasiveness, leaving our current vaccines markedly more ineffective and our population exposed again.

Again, a caveat: I might be very, very wrong, and I hope I am. But I don’t think I am.

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• Edited by Anthony Luciani
• Produced by Willow Beck
• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com
• Artwork by Amrit Pal