(The Epoch Times on January 13, 2022) Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top U.S. health officials said this week that nearly all Americans are Will be infected with the COVID-19 (CCP virus) Omicron variant. This has been a dramatic shift from their perceptions in the early days of the pandemic.
Fauci, the top medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, said at a conference at the Center for Strategic & International Studies on Tuesday (January 11): “I think , in many ways, almost everyone will eventually be infected due to the extraordinary and unprecedented transmission efficiency of the Omicron variant.”
A few hours earlier, Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), made a similar point.
“I think most people are going to have COVID-19, and it’s hard to deal with what’s actually happening,” she told a congressional panel in Washington.
Initially, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccine was advertised as a way to prevent coronavirus infection. Officials hope to vaccinate enough people to achieve herd immunity in hopes of greatly reducing or even eliminating the coronavirus.
“If viruses can’t replicate, they don’t mutate, and you can stop them from replicating by vaccinating enough people so that the virus has nowhere to go,” Fauci told NPR in the summer of 2021.
But these wishes were not realized. Mainly because, even before the Omicron variant appeared in Africa at the end of October, these vaccines had been shown to be increasingly less effective at preventing infection.
“Two doses of the vaccine are not enough for the Omicron variant,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said at a conference this week. “The third dose currently available. Vaccines provide fairly good protection against fatal infections, decent protection against hospitalization after infection, but less protection against infection itself.”
According to the latest data, the Omicron variant is better at evading immunity from vaccines and previous infections. Even booster vaccines will quickly reduce their protection against it.
But these vaccines still provided protection against severe symptoms after infection, although not as protectively as they did against the Delta variant. Booster vaccines can enhance this protection, but some health authorities have warned against reusing booster vaccines because of the risk to the immune system of the recipient.
Senior officials in the Biden administration, such as Fauci, have now acknowledged that eradicating the virus, which many Americans will contract, is impossible. “We’re not going to eradicate it,” Fauci said.
The U.S. health department is still going all out to promote vaccination, urging the unvaccinated to get the vaccine and the vaccinated to get the booster vaccine. Some groups have been approved or even advised to get a two-dose booster vaccine.
Currently, three-quarters of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, but that hasn’t stopped the Omicron variant from spreading across communities, infecting both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of COVID-19 cases and the number of people hospitalized after infection have both reached record highs in recent days, with each day last week 1,600 people have died from the virus, an increase of about 40% from the previous week.
Still, many confirmed infections with the Omicron variant have no or few symptoms, according to data from several states first released this month. And of those who were hospitalized after contracting COVID-19, in fact, about half were hospitalized for other reasons.
After the Omicron variant emerged, the researchers examined hospitalizations for COVID-19 infection in the Kaiser Permanente health care system in Southern California. The newly published report says there is substantial evidence that the Omicron variant is far less dangerous than the Delta variant. Of the more than 52,000 Omicron patients, zero patients required ventilators to maintain their breathing; only one died after infection; and only seven patients required intensive care after infection.
Still, U.S. health officials are concerned about insufficient capacity and staffing in hospitals everywhere, as the number of infections has risen sharply in recent days in a new wave of infections fueled by the Omicron variant.
Responsible editor: Ye Ziwei 3
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