Yes, they are developing an Omicron vaccine with a March target date.
Meanwhile, virtually everyone who is not already immune is going to be infected with the mild Omicron variant.
From what I see, the Omicron vaccine will only make sense for a tiny fraction of the population who are very vulnerable to infection but somehow managed to avoid being infected with everyone else in the next few weeks.
Large numbers of boosters are likely to cause more harm than good. Here is what the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) head of vaccines strategy had so say (Zerohedge link in post 4):
Cavaleri said that for a hypothetical approach of giving boosters frequently, such as every four months, “we will end up potentially having problems with immune response and immune response may end up not being as good as we would like it to be, so we should be careful in not overloading the immune system with repeated immunization.”
There is a delay of two or four weeks between testing positive and death. Delta cases were increasing rapidly until mid-December when Omicron became dominant.
A related issue is that at this point so many people are testing positive to Omicron that there is good chance that terminal patients will have it when they enter the hospital or catch there after admission.
At this point, the official figures show over 20 million active cases. Given the mild symptoms and lack of test kits, the actual number of active cases could easily be two or three times higher.
If 10% of population has COVID, then 10% of the deaths should be COVID-positive just by coincidence.
Leaving aside that people who had covid but died of non-covid reasons are not listed as covid deaths, what is driving the increase in ICU hospitalization? That’s a leading indicator that more deaths are coming.
How many people in the ICU are getting infected by COVID-positive workers?
Statistics in the US are hard to come by, but half of the COVID-positive ICU cases in Ontario are fully vaccinated:
As Omicron pushes Delta to extinction, COVID is becoming an epidemic of the vaccinated. The vaccines provide little protection and the most-vulnerable people are the ones who are most likely to be vaccinated.
Ontario is 78% vaccinated. So 22% of the population accounts for 50% of ICU hospitalizations. You’re more likely to need ICU care if you are unvaccinated.
California: A preliminary US study of nearly 70,000 Covid positive people showed a substantially reduced risk of hospitalisation and death from Omicron even after controlling for growing population immunity levels.
People infected with Omicron were half as likely to be hospitalised, about 75 percent less likely to need intensive care, and around 90 percent less likely to die compared to those infected with the formerly dominant Delta variant, according to the paper.
Of some 50,000 people infected with Omicron, none ended up on a ventilator.
OK, that is great news and affirms what many others have been saying. Since ICU and deaths are on the increase that must mean that Delta is still present and dangerous. To say that it is no longer necessary to get vaccinated because Omicron is milder is therefore an incorrect conclusion.
Delta was dominant the US until a few weeks ago. The lastest data show Omicron is now 98% of infections in the US, which means that data with Delta is obsolete. Omicron is rapidly driving Delta to extinction. Vaccines are no longer of much value in preventing infections.
In addition, new data from the UK is showing that vaccines greatly increase the risk of myocarditis in men under 40 compared to that of COVID infection. Vaccinations of boys and younger men appear to be doing far more harm than good at this point, especially for the Moderna vaccine (mRNA-1273).
Again, if Omicron has been predominant for a few weeks then why are deaths and ICU hospitalizations increasing? Why are deaths in South Africa and the UK increasing, both who are past their Omicron case peaks? If not from Omicron then Delta is on the rise.
The huge number of active cases mean that a significant number of people who die from other causes will happened to test COVID positive just by chance. The number of observed deaths is consistent with this effect.
Consider current figures from the UK. There are 3.7 million active COVID cases out a population of 68 million people. That means 5.4% of the population is currently COVID positive.
There were about 600,000 deaths in 2019. That works out to about 1640 deaths per day.
If people who are dying of other causes have the same rate being COVID positive as the general population, then 5.4% of the deaths should be COVID positive. That works out to about 89 deaths per day just by coincidence.
Given the large number of mild cases and limited testing resources, the actual percentage of people with active cases could easily be two or three times higher than the official figures. That means that 150 to 300 COVID-positive deaths per day could be expected just by coincidence. The most recent 7-day average is 261 deaths/day, which is within that range
Based on the newest UK data, the vast majority of COVID deaths appear to be people dying with COVID not because of COVID.
