The calendar of the late medieval peasant included around 115 Holy Days. For starters there were 52 Sundays, 12 Days of Christmas, 7 of Easter, 7 of Whitsun, then a string of days for major saints, plus one for the saint whose name you bore and another for the patron saint of your parish church.
Some, like the further 40 days of Lent, were for fasting and abstinence, others for feasting. Hopefully the local monastery, or lord, would lay on a spread. If you consider this last point rose-tinted, note that Martin Luther condemned Holy Days precisely because “they are abused by drinking, gambling, loafing, and all manner of sin,[meaning] we anger God more on Holy Days than we do on other days.”
Nowadays, the secular calendar of public health fills an even larger fraction of the year and includes no fun or feasts, obviating Luther’s objection. There are four months, two coinciding, of forswearing toxins and signalling virtue: Stoptober, Movember, Dry January and Veganuary. On a higher plane, the WHO has 25 days or weeks devoted to solidarity against threats such as Lead Poisoning, AIDS, TB, Drowning, and ‘Neglected Tropical Diseases.’ The UN adds more: for example World Toilet Day, (19 Nov).
The WHO’s World Antibiotic Awareness Week (WAAW) begins a day earlier on the 18th and continues till Thursday the 24th. WAAW used to be a single day (18 Nov), but now it’s a week, which underscores the importance the WHO attaches.
It’s of some professional interest because I used to head the UK’s national reference lab for antibiotic resistance and had to engage with it. And, yes, there is a genuine problem with resistance, as well as some exaggerated hyperbole. Succinctly, antibiotics kill susceptible bacteria, leaving resistant ones to survive and infect the next patient. Over time this Darwinian selection means that drugs can become useless. We successively ‘lost’ sulfonamides, penicillin, tetracycline and ciprofloxacin against gonorrhoea, for example. Otherwise-harmless gut and environmental bacteria that opportunistically infect ICU patients are especially adept at acquiring resistance, even to the newest drugs.
So, I’m in favour of prudent, better-targeted, antibiotic use, to slow this evolution.
Which is why yesterday’s news – in the London Daily Mail , then confirmed from the FDA website – brought a groan. WAAW begins with a shortage of amoxicillin – one of the world’s most widely-used antibiotics. The driver is a big increase in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) among US children and, more surprisingly, adults. RSV rates among seniors are 10-fold higher than normal for the season. This follows similar RSV surges in Japan and New Zealand in 2021. On top of which there’s an explosion of influenza in the US, with rates higher than for the corresponding week of every year in the past decade.
These RSV and flu patients roll into emergency rooms and are given amoxicillin ‘just in case’ their viral infection leads to a bacterial one. Whether they should be given an antibiotic is doubtful. Most wouldn’t develop bacterial superinfection. The amoxicillin will do nothing to cure the viral infection and may select resistance among their gut bacteria, which might seed a subsequent harder-to-treat urinary infection.
Nonetheless, the prescribing is understandable. The clinician has a queue of patients. Each is happier with ‘treatment.’ Around two or three per hundred among the elderly would develop bacterial pneumonia. Maybe one per hundred would land in hospital, costing far more than 100 courses of amoxicillin. And he or she might sue the physician who denied the antibiotic.
So, rather than condemning questionable amoxicillin prescribing, let’s put the blame where it is due. On two and a half years’ insanity, which precipitated this mess. On the failure of the medico-scientific establishment to see beyond their one obsession of controlling COVID or even achieving Zero-COVID. On ignoring every predictable piece of collateral damage, including impacts on other diseases prioritised with their own ‘Holy Days.’
Above all, we should start by acknowledging that we live in messy equilibria with respiratory viruses, not perfect immunity. We are infected and develop short-duration protection. Once this fades we are prone to be reinfected, perhaps by a viral variant that partially escapes our residual defences. The cycle then repeats. Flu vaccines help a bit but haven’t eradicated influenza.
In infancy each virus is new, so we spend our winters as snotty-nosed brats, with one cold after another. Equilibria establish as we grow to adolescence, though. Afterwards we catch only occasional colds. Many are asymptomatic, as reported for rhinoviruses in university students and influenza in school-aged children. These reboot immunity without us knowing we’re infected. SARS-CoV-2 was a problem because we adults had to begin to build immunity de novo, sometimes at an advanced age. And, as with learning a language, it’s easier at 5 than 75.
Lockdowns, masks and social distancing failed to stop circulation of SARS-CoV-2. What they did achieve was to disrupt our equilibria with other respiratory viruses. Flu and RSV all but ‘disappeared’ in 2020 and early 2021, leaving our immunity to decay. Now they are roaring back, finding victims aplenty, even in age cohorts who normally evade symptomatic RSV. This, in turn, drives antibiotic use, warranted or not, and deepens the amoxicillin shortage.
Just in time to mock WAAW.
WAAW isn’t the only WHO Holy Day (or Week, rather) thus defiled. Take TB Day (24 March). Distribution of antibiotics for tuberculosis was hit by lockdowns in South and Southeast Asia, raising the risk of treatment failures and resistance. Ditto for HIV/AIDS (1 Dec). Next, there’s Immunisation Week (24-30 April). Whatever benefits COVID vaccines have for the old and infirm, efforts to force them – with mandates and vaccine passports – onto the young and healthy, who then caught COVID anyway, has fed understandable distrust. This undermines uptake of other vaccines that are more unequivocally beneficial. Last, there’s World Mental Health Day (10 Oct). Lockdowns and masks weren’t good for anyone’s mental health, to say the least.
Of all organisations, the WHO, with its calendar of Holy Days as an aide memoire, should have recognised how so many aspects of health and well-being interlock, and how fighting an existential war with one pathogen would impact other priorities. It had a sane and proportionate respiratory pandemic plan in 2019.
This made no mention of general lockdowns, was sceptical of masks except for the symptomatic, and abjured border closures, contact tracing or quarantine of contacts. All this good sense, designed for influenza and applicable to other respiratory virus, was abandoned overnight in March 2020.
Now the consequences are coming back everywhere, even hitting priority targets identified by the WHO’s own High and Holy Days. Before it has any Pandemic Treaty, the WHO must be forced to reflect on this and to remember the first law of medicine: ‘Do no harm.’
About the Author
David Livermore is retired Professor of Microbiology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
