Like inflation, Covid poses the greatest risk to older people. The battle against it therefore primarily benefits them. No wonder young people have had enough.

(Originally published Noc. 22 in “What in the World“) As predicted, U.S. authorities late Friday endorsed booster shots for all vaccinated Americans. With children 5-12 now receiving vaccines, this should provide an extra level of protection for the U.S. against the winter surge lapping up against its shores from Europe.

Think we’re “living with the virus?” Think again…

The winter surge is likely to reverberate to tropical Asia, too, as more countries there (except China) are reopening to vaccinated visitors, notably business hub Singapore and winter vacation hub Thailand. Asia is likely to get hit much worse, since while its jab rate is rising fast, it remains much lower than in the West.

The trouble, however, is that high vaccination rates among eligible adults aren’t limiting new infections—the vaunted “herd immunity”—the way we’d hoped. One reason is that, though the surge across the Atlantic has been dismissed as a pandemic of the unvaccinated, the Delta variant of Covid still poses significant and rising risk. And unvaccinated adults are one obvious weak link.

But Delta is also infecting an increasing number of vaccinated adults, too. This troubling article in Nature about breakthrough infections in the UK suggests that Europe and the US may be heading for the same kind of persistent, rolling resurgences of infection. People whose immune systems are already weak are especially vulnerable to breakthorugh infection. But there’s also a natural decay over time in the protection that vaccines provide.

Those vaccinated individuals who do manage to get infected are much less likely to suffer the kind of severe infection that lands them in the hospital, but it does happen. And they’re still likely to suffer some ill effects, including several days of flu-like symptoms and loss of smell.

Perhaps the biggest remaining loophole for the virus, however, is children. Kids are providing Covid with a powerful reservoir. Not only are they ineligible for vaccination in Europe until the age 12 and in the U.S. up to the age 5, they generally are resilient enough to be infected without exhibiting any symptoms. And, they are forced to mingle five times a week in school, where they avidly flout social distancing rules to play and, well, be kids. This is evident in that 40-somethings are leading breakthrough infections in the U.K. That’s because this age cohort is more likely to live with an unvaccinated child, and vaccinated people are much more likely to get Covid if living with an infected person.

Growing protests in Europe against renewed restrictions on gathering and movement are likely to fuel the debate over who the enemies in this battle truly are. Like the argument over interest rates, inflation and inequality, Covid has become part of a generational conflict. The virus, like inflation, is mainly an affliction for older adults. They are the most vulnerable to severe cases of Covid and therefore the benefits of restrictions on all of society accrue to them. Likewise, they have accumulated the greatest savings and are already on the downward slope of their career curves, so any attempts to control inflation and job growth by limiting government spending or raising rates primarily benefits them.

This helps explain in part why Asian politicians have held a stauncher line against the virus than in the West—older, aging voters predominate their constituencies.

So no wonder young people are protesting. They’ve already won the fiscal and monetary battle; if they can sweep away the last attempts to control Covid, they can decimate the folks standing in the way of untrammeled freedom and opportunity—their parents.