The Covid Screwtape Letters — Part 14: The Liturgical Calendar of Variants

"You have made mutation the universal excuse, the devil who must always be chased but never caught."

Part 1 (origins), Part 2 (masks), Part 3 (lockdowns), Part 4 (the new normal), Part 5 (plexiglass), Part 6 (quarantines), Part 7 (social distancing), Part 8 (swabs), Part 9 (essential workers), Part 10 (hypocrisy), Part 11 (Inflated Deaths), Part 12 (hospital overload), Part 13 (natural immunity)

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My Dear Dr. F.,

It delights me beyond measure, dear nephew, to watch your campaign of seasonal dread unfold like a deranged ecclesiastical calendar. The “experts” once relied upon mere case counts to keep the pews trembling — but you have discovered a far more renewable fuel: the eternal variant.

Truly, you have turned viral evolution — that ordinary, mechanistic, utterly predictable quirk of RNA — into a renewing sacrament, refreshed each quarter like the Church’s feast days.

And how beautifully the flock responds! What Lent or Advent once did for the medieval soul, Omicron, Delta, BA.2.86, JN.1 now does for the modern one: marking the seasons, guiding the mood, sanctifying obedience.

Your mastery is evident in how you made the naming of each variant itself a ritual of fear. When the WHO skipped the Greek letter Xi — to avoid offending a certain emperor (a delicious stroke of flattery visible even in your mortal friend’s commentary) — they revealed that the nomenclature was less about science and more about narrative hygiene.

And then, like incense rising from a fresh censer, came the prophets of doom. Eric Feigl-Ding, ever the herald of the apocalypse, declared with trembling fingers that a new strain was “possibly 500% more infectious,” accompanied by graphs that soared heavenward like flaming arrows.

Nothing says “ignore the South African GP calling it mild” like a “500%” in red ink.

Of course, the real art is not the prediction — it is the amnesia you have trained into the faithful. They never remember that the last four variant prophecies were duds. They never recall that Omicron’s “most staggering stat yet” turned out to be a fast-moving head cold. They certainly don’t notice that every. single. time. the experts predict the “biggest wave yet,” the cases quietly fall the following week.

You’ve even reached the point where experts, seeing JN.1, proclaimed waves “larger than Omicron,” only to watch UK cases drop 20% almost immediately after their predictions.

Yet these prophets suffer no embarrassment. Their reward for failure is more interviews. Predictive incompetence has become a priestly credential.

Your greatest stroke of cunning, however, lies in convincing the public that variants explain away all policy failure. Mandates didn’t work? A new variant. Lockdowns failed? Variant. Boosters waned? Variants. Masks didn’t stop spread? Variants.

You have made mutation the universal excuse, the devil who must always be chased but never caught.

Most exquisite of all — and here I must bow to genius — is how you used variants to hide vaccine disappointment. As “breakthrough infections” became the dominant scenario, even in highly vaccinated populations, the explanation was always the same:
“Ah! A variant so slippery even our miracle cannot contain it.”

The data showing higher case rates among the vaccinated in many age groups — those awkward UK charts, those German breakthrough numbers climbing week by week, the nosocomial outbreak in Israel where 96% of exposed were vaccinated — all quietly laid at the feet of “variant behavior.”

What a splendid redirection!

There is more, but I shall let you savor your triumph in your reply. You have turned fear into produce — and ensured that it always appears freshly picked.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

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My Dearest Uncle Screwtape,

Your praise falls upon me like a booster that actually works.

Yes — Variant Theater has become my most reliable franchise. And the beauty is that mutations themselves require no effort; they emerge constantly. My job is merely to choose one, inflate it like a carnival balloon, and let the media parade it through town.

The JN.1 affair was a particularly satisfying episode. As you noted, the sages proclaimed “a major surge,” bigger than previous waves. Yet within days, UK cases were dropping, not rising. But by then, the work was done — millions had already returned to masking, doomscrolling, and “just one more booster.”

Similarly, when Omicron first appeared, I helped orchestrate that magnificent display of political theater. Markets crashed, presidents shut down travel to eight African nations, and newspapers published breathless graphics despite having genome data from only 59 cases.

Science had not yet spoken — but Fear certainly had.

The variants serve another purpose too: they shield the public from noticing that the vaccines failed to stop transmission and did not deliver herd immunity. The uncomfortable facts —
• peak viral load no different by vaccination status,
• vaccinated transmitting readily in household studies,
• hospital outbreaks driven by fully vaccinated index cases
— all documented clearly in that Lancet piece (“grossly negligent” to ignore the vaccinated as a source of transmission) — would have caused an uproar.
But with variants as scapegoat? Silence.

Variant Theater also justifies perpetual emergency powers. Each strain resets the clock. New strain, new state of emergency. New strain, new mask culture revival. New strain, new funding. The magic words “highly transmissible” are the public-health equivalent of a blank check.

I admit, Uncle, I chuckled when Zero Covid apostles like Devi Sridhar retroactively declared that by “elimination,” they meant “maximum suppression.” The variant waves showed that elimination had failed spectacularly, yet she escaped with nothing more than a semantic shrug. Such is the power of perpetual crisis: it absolves prophets of every wrong prediction.

But my favorite aspect of Variant Theater is this:

Variants allow the public to feel both frightened and virtuous.Fear is exhausting, yes — but fear wrapped in moral performance? Delicious.
Each wave brings new hashtags, new rituals, new moral hierarchies. They become fearful and proud of being afraid.

Uncle, the variants have given me what every bureaucrat longs for:
A crisis without end, and a populace without memory.

Yours in endless mutation,
Dr. F.