The Omikron variant is spreading rapidly, especially the USA has high corona numbers. Now the leading US immunologist Fauci is making a new prognosis.
Washington DC – The Corona variant * Omikron is causing a rapidly increasing number of infections worldwide. The USA * registered more than a million new infections over several days. The situation in hospitals is also tense because of the pandemic *. The Omikron variant is considered highly contagious.
According to leading US immunologist Anthony Fauci, sooner or later Omikron will affect almost everyone. One group is worst hit, he emphasized.
Corona in the USA: According to Fauci, the Omicron variant will mainly affect people who have not been vaccinated
“With the extraordinary and unprecedented effectiveness of the transfer, Omikron will ultimately find almost everyone,” said immunologist and advisor to President Joe Biden * on Tuesday (January 11, 2022). Vaccinated people would get infected too, but most of them would not be so hard to find. So you don’t have to go to hospital or you wouldn’t die, said Fauci in an interview with the think tank “Center for Strategic and International Studies” (CSIS).
The immunologist said the worst will be those who are still not vaccinated. In the United States, only 208 million people, or just under 63 percent of the population, are fully vaccinated. 76 million people have received a booster vaccination so far. Fauci had already warned of the current corona wave at the end of November *.
Fauci’s testimony came just hours after a similar warning from Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock. “It is difficult to process what is actually happening at the moment, namely that most people will get Covid,” said Woodcock at a hearing in the US Senate on the Omicron variant. “We need to make sure that the hospitals are still working, that transportation and other essential services are not interrupted while this is happening,” she said.
Omikron: Corona variant “drives case numbers to unprecedented heights”
At the hearing, Rochelle Walensky, director of the US health department CDC, said: Omikron is “driving the number of cases to unprecedented heights here in the United States and around the world.” On average, over the past seven days, there have been around 750,000 confirmed new infections per day in the USA, according to CDC data.
At the hearing in the Senate, there was also a verbal argument between Anthony Fauci and Rand Paul, Republican * and Senator for the US state of Kentucky. Paul accused Fauci of denigrating researchers with different views on Corona and of being responsible for school closings, for example. He also accused the immunologist of covering up the origin of the coronavirus. Fauci resisted and made the senator jointly responsible for threats against himself and his family. “Something like that incites the crazy people out there, and I get death threats, my family is molested, my children get obscene phone calls,” he said.
“As usual, you distort everything that concerns me,” added Fauci. “You are using a catastrophic epidemic to your political advantage.” A fundraising website owned by Rand Paul read big, “Fires Dr. Fauci ”, right next to it, donations were asked for the Senator’s election campaign, as Fauci pointed out. In contrast to many Democrats *, the Republicans reject the vast majority of measures to contain the pandemic, such as mandatory masking. (lrg / dpa) * fr.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
Header list image: © Pool / AFP
