Cocktails with Omicron

‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” So the old saying goes, and so went my Christmas. This year, oblivious to what fate had in store, I pulled a full, wild-eyed imitation of Clark Griswold, with plans to host the ultimate good old-fashioned family Christmas: Both sets of grandparents! Two themed trees! Sugar-cookie decorating! A crab-cake night! Friends, here is how far my dedication took me: I bought everyone matching Christmas pajamas.

Sounds magical, right? Wrong. I got the Omicron variant instead. In short, my best-laid plans went kaput.

If you have somehow managed not to get the Omicron variant — or “the ’Cron,” as my family has lovingly taken to calling it — congratulations. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s a solid chance you will get it soon. I personally picked up the Omicron at a lovely dinner party populated entirely by fully vaccinated and/or boosted attendees and then promptly spread it to my entire immediate family.

Flights were canceled; reservations dissolved. Goodbye, glorious family Christmas itinerary! Farewell, fancy wine pairings! Hello, Christmas evening with a box of Kleenex, microwave popcorn, and a somber viewing of Bruce Willis’s holiday classic, Die Hard!

Who else is getting the ’Cron? Pretty much everyone. I know vaccinated people — like me — who have gotten it. I know unvaccinated people who have gotten it. I know triple-shot boosted people who have gotten it. At places like Cornell University, with strict mask mandates and a student-vaccination rate hovering around 99 percent, Covid cases have recently exploded.

Meanwhile, according to a December 30 report from the Telegraph, one is not safe even at the wildest ends of the earth: Two-thirds of a 25-person team of intrepid and fully vaccinated researchers in a far corner of Antarctica recently contracted Covid, “despite all staff passing multiple PCR tests, quarantining and living in one of the most remote places in the world.”

Remember that viral video from 2011 featuring a honey badger tromping around the desert, fighting poisonous snakes, and wolfing down entire beehives while a crazed, foul-mouthed narrator yelled things in between swear words like “Ew! What’s that in its mouth?!? Oh, it’s got a cobra?” And “Oh! It’s chasing a jackal? Oh my gosh!” And, most famously: “Honey badger don’t care!” Well, neither does the latest version of Covid-19. It simply does not give a rip.

Here’s a silver lining: As numerous press reports have related, for most people the symptoms of Omicron are relatively mild. For my family, it was like a bad cold. Want more good news? According to certain promising reports, I and my family have likely now gained “super immunity” to the current circulating variants of Covid-19. Just like the infamous honey badger, we can now do wild and crazy things, like go to New York City and eat the leftover pieces of chewed gum stuck to the underside of every Midtown diner table in an 18-block radius!

Just joking: My kids haven’t tried a stunt like that since they were toddlers. More importantly, we will not be traveling to New York City anytime soon, because the local government there — and in Chicago, now that I think about it, and in Boston, and in Washington, D.C., and, as always, in the entire State of California — has completely lost the plot.

My kids may now be naturally immune to Covid, but that doesn’t matter: If they’re not vaccinated for an older variant of a virus they’ve already fought off, they’re not getting into any restaurant or theater in Manhattan. Moreover, I may now be “super immune” and naturally boosted by my bout with Omicron, but if I read the tea leaves correctly, my measly two shots of Pfizer might get me lumped in with the “unvaccinated” very soon. None of this makes any sense, of course, but government overreach has never been nuanced.

I’m not here to throw the vaccines out the window; consistent and significant evidence shows that they reduce the severity and duration of Covid across the board.

What they do not do, however, is stop the spread of Covid-19, which means that the various vaccine mandates popping up like so many honey badgers — and the persistent rumblings about future mandates on planes and in schools and elsewhere, along with the seemingly insatiable left-wing demand to force people to get booster shots up to infinity whether they’ve had Covid or not — defy basic logic. Even members of the FDA panel that approved vaccines for children aged five through eleven expressed concern that the approval might lead to unnecessary mandates, citing unknown side effects and safety concerns.

Ah, well. Folks, we’re in the best of hands! Responding to the latest surge of cases in a state with some of the strictest Covid protocols in the nation, New York’s governor declared, with a completely straight face, “We can control this.” Meanwhile, the indefatigable Dr. Fauci somehow keeps showing up on our television screens to confuse the nation with statements that contradict six previous versions of his own always very certain self. Joe Biden? Don’t ask. He’s likely wandering in a mask on the beach.

Like the giant boulder threatening to crush Indiana Jones in the greatest movie of all time, Raiders of the Lost Ark — followed, in order of greatness, by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Lego Batman Movie, Tim Burton’s Big Fish, and Sandra Bullock’s lady buddy-cop comedy The Heat — our ever-assured government entities will likely roll on, unabashed, even when we’re beyond Covid, and even when it’s become quite clear that people are making things up as they go along. Say what you will about government bureaucrats, they’re consistent: Always certain, often wrong.

Sorry, Big Apple: I’ve booked my next family trip to Miami. Here’s hoping you pull it together soon.