OMICRON LATEST - Panic versus Reality

All right. Well, good day and everyone, welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and today we have our, uh, second of our Omicron variant updates. Did one 2 weeks ago, and that one was so good we ran it 2 weeks in a row, and we're doing an update today. So Omicron, what is it? What's it doing in North America? What's it doing in other parts of the world? And is some of the popular media that is making me want to panic in the right place, or should I maybe do something else with my energy. So here we go. First off, as I always say, uh, number— this is not medical information. I'm just reporting news about medicine and health. So get your medical information from your, your healthcare team. It is December 23rd, 2021, and that's important because there's going to be things I reference today that if you're watching a month from now or a year from now may be very, very different. And, uh, I want to make sure that we're dealing with real-time data, and so we have everything as up to date as possible. Now, if you're watching the live stream, say on Facebook or on CTR Radio, you will not have these references I'm going to talk to you about. But when we move this recording over to YouTube, we'll put all of the references to the things that I'm going to be talking about in the description box. So check out down there in the description box. Again, if you can like, share, subscribe, all that, uh, all that good stuff. So Omicron, just to get our heads back in the game, that is a variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and it is the latest one to circle the globe, and it literally has circled the globe. And, uh, we last time were saying, well, we already have cases in the United States and Canada, and it cases in the UK and Scandinavia. Well, now we have many, many more cases, uh, and the way that it's going is we believe it started in southern Africa, and now most all of their cases are Omicron. And then it went, of course, to Europe and other parts of the world, uh, and in Europe now Omicron is overtaking Delta, which was our previous variant. And here in North America, Omicron is on this big upswing and Delta is starting to go down. So Important to know when we talk about, well, that the symptoms are more mild with Omicron, etc., we still have Delta circulating around. But what usually happens with variants is that as one tide comes in of the new one, especially if it has some gain of function, that it can do something better like infect you, it will beat out the current variant. But because North America is a little bit behind, say, Europe, our, you know, Delta versus Omicron is just a little bit different. So in the, in the description box below, the first link will actually be to the YouTube to the first Omicron update. And in that, I go a little bit more into its genetics and why it's shifted and how it's got sort of some features of common cold and, and some other stuff in it, even though, you know, coronaviruses mostly are common cold type viruses, and we deal with them all the time. They were just never famous before. SARS-CoV-2 certainly had many other features. So if you want to get the deep, deep end on all that, please go back and listen to that one, and I've got the link down in the description box below. But as far as the United States, as of yesterday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky said yesterday, 12/22, so this is the 23rd of December, 12/22 yesterday, Omicron COVID-19, this is a quote, variant has quickly overtaken Delta as the dominant strain of the virus across the United States, accounting for 90% of the cases in some parts of the country. Now, we've talked about this before, but just really quickly because it's a super common question, how do they know? Like, you do the swab test or whatever, and that goes into a lab, but it just says, you know, yeah, yes, this is SARS-CoV-2 or not. What happens is in your state or your locality, or if you're in Canada through Health Canada, portions of the laboratory test— not all labs, usually your state-run labs and certain other labs— portions of those that are sent off for genetic analysis, and that's how they can sequence to say, oh, this is Delta, or this was Beta, or this is wild type. or this is Omicron. So that's where they're getting these numbers from. Now, something I just wanted to go through from the point of view of some terminology really quickly, and this is— I don't use a lot of graphics, and you'll see why here. The outer ring, if you look at terminology, outer ring The biggest number are going to be infections. And we, we don't, and we will never know the total number of infections because everyone's not being tested. Now, there are some places such as Denmark that we're going to talk about where they come close to that. But certainly here in North America, you're not testing everybody. So you never know really what that outer number is. But the next number, the next biggest number usually is number of cases. And cases equals some diagnostic went into telling you it's a case. Now, a diagnostic could be a test or signs and symptoms plus a test. A symptomatic case is signs and symptoms plus a positive test, but you can have, as we've talked about, asymptomatic cases where you have a positive test but no real symptoms, and you are still counted as a case. Okay, so then if we go in there, We have a big one is diagnosed, diagnosed cases, and then we have symptomatic cases, which is a smaller number. Then we have hospitalized cases, which is a tiny number, and then deaths, which is the tiniest number. And so you want to remember when they're talking about things, sometimes they get, you know, and if you're, if you're running a news outlet or you're trying to do news stories or whatever, you're generally trying to, you know, grab headlines and you know, maybe even clickbait or whatever. And so, you know, they'll say it's spreading like wildfire and, you know, infections or cases are out of control, whatever. We have to remember that infection rate and case rate, especially with Omicron, are gonna be super high, but that doesn't mean that the disease and endpoint problems are also going to be super high. So when we see these things about it's taking over and there's wildfire and all of these, you know, terms like that, yeah, as I described in the last update, which you can go and listen to if you want, Omicron's— one of its best gains of function is its ability to infect more people more quickly. And the other thing that we believe now is that it infects you and it has a little bit of a lead time before you get symptoms. Then when you do get symptoms, you're not— you don't think you have COVID, you think you have a cold. And so that could be you more time to spread it around. But what's its other awesome gain of function on the viral side? I'm not saying this is awesome for you and me, but if you're a virus, is another awesome gain of function is its penetrance into the vaccinated community of us in the world who have COVID vaccination 2, 3, 4 times, depending on where you're at in the world, is very high. And so not only is it the unvaccinated, which are mostly what the news stories focus on, but the vaccinated who get it, they get even lower symptoms usually, so they're able to spread it to more people. And again, all of those stats and all that stuff, last one, I go into that a lot more. Now there is, uh, one other, just, you know, let's think about this because the news can kind of twist these things. And if you're not used to thinking in terms of like numbers and percentages and, you know, and ratios and quantities, it can make it kind of, um, a little muddy when you're reading this stuff, and it gets really scary. And as I said with the first one, I mean, I was, I was going to do a rerun because of the death in the family. I was going to do a rerun on that one, but just the news stories I was hearing were just so crazy, uh, at least many of them were, not all of them, that I wanted to kind of set some of the records straight. Well, the next thing I just wanted to show you now, this will be our last graphic for today. I know you're all waiting for graphics, but just the ratios of— okay, we talk about, okay, this spreads more quickly, it gets into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. And in the case of some countries where they're testing, it's higher in vaccinated people. Omicron, we'll get to that coming up. But be that as it may, it doesn't matter. It's just, it's infecting a lot of people. So remember the Big outer ring is infections and then cases that we know about, and then we get smaller. So if we have something like a variant and it's like, say, Delta— now, why do I use— and I apologize for those of you listening to audio, but what I'm holding up is some Legos here. Why do I use Legos? Because I have a lot of grandchildren and we have a billion Legos, so I can build Lego models of all kinds of stuff. If this yellow rectangle here is all of the cases, and there's usually a ratio of cases to hospitalizations, and this little red button over here of Lego is illustrative of the hospitalizations, you have a ratio of the big yellow cases to hospitalizations. Now, the rest of those cases are generally going to be treating themselves at home, isolating, doing all the good stuff that we're supposed to do. But if you have a smaller rectangle, you're going to have the smallest number of hospitalizations. So what the news stories usually say is, well, it's going to go up, we're going to get all these more infections, and then we're going to overwhelm our hospitals. Big, you know, overrun of the hospitals. Now, what did I say to you during Delta? Of course that's going to happen because it spreads faster. Well, Omicron spreads way faster than Delta did. Now, thankfully, its disease state that it creates is a lot lower than Delta. So hospitalizations are actually going to be lower. We'll get to that later. But you still have this ratio. So if I have this mushrooming of cases and I go from like this little rectangle here to the beginning of Omicron, we'll look at the— you know, this green rectangle is a lot bigger than the yellow one. That just means that suddenly we get this burgeoning in cases And look at the red squares, those are hospitalized people. There's, there's more of them. So it's the same ratio of hospitalization, but because I have this giant larger amount of people who are infected, I have more. And then let's say, as the modeling is looking at, if in the next 2 to 3 weeks we're looking at 100% exposure in North America, we could maybe push that out to 4 or 5 weeks. We want to be you know, luxurious about it. We go from what we have right now, which is this bigger rectangle than we had with Delta, to this really big one here, this big square, in the same ratio of people. But look, we got all these more, uh, all the more red folks in the hospital over there. So that's how you get a, uh, a hospital burden that comes along in the system. Now, the hospital burden tends to be, even with Omicron, with the same groups of folks. And that is— and we did see, yes, a little bit more with Delta. We saw more children, et cetera. But that all worked itself out. And there was some really horrible reporting, inaccurate reporting about how many children had Delta and all that. But more did with Delta. Omicron, everybody is going to be exposed to this. Probably everyone will get it in one way or the other. And so, yes, with children. But it tends— if it's children, it tends to be children with preexisting conditions, respiratory disease, et cetera. older folks, uh, more than younger folks, uh, people with diabetes, pre-existing heart and lung conditions, uh, obesity, etc. The same stuff over and over and over. So I just wanted to go through those and make sure we understand these ratios. It's natural if you have something that's going to go up in its infectious rate, you're going to have more hospitalizations. Now, is it going to overwhelm all the hospitals and, you know, and every hospital will shut down, we'll have no hospital beds left? Probably not. That's not happening in any other country in the world. And we have data now from South Africa, which is where it started, that's showing that the hospitalizations have plateaued. And, and half of the people who are hospitalized with Omicron aren't even in there for Omicron. They're there for other reasons. And they were diagnosed accidentally because they're all getting swabbed when they go in the hospital. So a lot of the hospitalizations are diagnosis after you went in there to get your other hospital procedure done for a non-COVID disease anyway. So, you know, we have to keep these things in mind. And that's not to say that if you're one of those people who has a, you know, dangerous or bad outcome or something, that, you know, that, that's very, very bad. But we, we need to be realistic about this, that this, you know, increase is not— it's going to happen because of those ratios I showed you. And just think of the bigger green boxes, more infections. more percentage of people going to the hospital. But it also— it's going to be like wildfire, kind of go up and then down very, very quickly. Now, there is something— so the CDC director, I did— I just did a direct quote from her from yesterday saying that based on their genomics, 90% of the cases right now in America, United States, and probably in Canada are Omicron. And, um, one of the things that surprised me in the news, and I'll just, I'll just make a point of this, is not— this is not political, just it's— I didn't understand what it was said. Uh, quote unquote, the president said it didn't take that long at all. What happened was the Omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought. And that was, uh, said, uh, and I've got a link in the thing down there below, but said just a few days ago. And this is odd in my personal opinion, you know, for anyone to say, let alone president, uh, because everybody knew this was spreading fast. I mean, every single scientist I have listened to and read and every— I mean, nobody was saying this wasn't going to spread fast. So for, for us in the United States to say, well, we were taken by surprise by this, you know, especially when We got to watch Southern Africa, and then we got to watch it spread to Europe and Scandinavia and then over to us. We should have been a little bit more on the ball with that. Now, the next thing, and I had people messaging me and emailing me about this, is the modeling. And one of the big modeling centers is down the road here at University of Washington, and I've got their link too, and you can look at modeling. And they're looking at, you know, with doubling times and everything, essentially everybody's gonna be exposed to this, okay? And we have large numbers right now of both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, and even triple-vaxxed people being exposed and getting Omicron. The only upside to that is, is that it tends to be a more cold-like illness rather than the lower respiratory, very damaging sort of illness of, say, the wild type and the originals. So while the modeling looks, you know, pretty hairy, you need to remember that it is just modeling, and modeling isn't always correct. But bottom line is everyone's going to be— have an opportunity to be exposed in the next 4 to 6 weeks, certainly. Now, there's another thing that I wanted to point out, and, you know, kind of talking quickly because I got a lot of pages of notes of questions people ask. I'm trying to get through all of this. The next thing though, and I've got a link to the news report about the study. There's a study that's still in peer review, so it hasn't gone all the way through the peer review process and be published, but it's very interesting and a lot of the scientists in Europe have been talking about it. And basically, I'll leave the link in the description box, but this study shows that Omicron, one of its gambits it has to get into us more quickly but also cause a different type of a disease, is it tends to infect the upper airways and not the lower airways as bad as Delta or the prior variants or the wild type of SARS-CoV-2. What this means is that it hangs out in the upper airways more like a cold, like a common cold virus would, as opposed to going down and making pneumonia and consolidation, that's really good when it comes to complications and people dying and things of that nature. But it also means that it gives you a lower-level disease, meaning you're going to run around with it and probably spread it to other people before you realize that it was actually one of the SARS-CoV-2 family. That's both good and bad. But the really nice thing about that is if you're like me and you're asthmatic or— well, I'm elderly and asthmatic actually, so there you go, I've got 2 of those. Or you're a kid and you're asthmatic, or you, you know, you've got some other lung problems or whatever, it's a lot easier to survive an upper respiratory airway landing and infecting bug than a lower respiratory landing and infecting bug. Now the next thing I wanted to get to, and again, if you really want to get into that paper, I'll have the link in there. It's the 3rd or 4th link down, but It's, uh, in this case, because this is not peer-reviewed yet, I didn't do a link to the actual paper, but I did a link to a really good medical reporting site that, that basically gives you the, the bullet of what the, what the study found and gives you some information about this. Very, very interesting. And it's actually— it makes like, if we had to pick one variant where 100% of people probably are going to be exposed to it, this would be the one that we'd want to pick. We didn't get a choice in this. But if you had to roll the dice, you know, on the genetic changes and which one you want to get to have circle the globe and, you know, everybody get it, it's probably going to be this one because it's got the lowest, uh, the lowest disease penetrance. So the signs and symptoms are very low, etc. And even if you look at like, um, you know, a lot of the interviews now with the professional sports teams where they've got, you know, 85 to 100% vaccination, but they've had to cancel games because of, you know, or delay games because of COVID infections. Most of the coaches are saying, you know, it's sort of like they're dealing with a bad cold and then they get over it. And that's really, really a good thing overall because it makes it much more survivable. It makes less people go to the hospital. and more, more treatment at home. Now, what is the hospitalization looking like? So I got some data from South Africa, and again, this is from a reporting service. I'll leave the link there if you want to go look at it. And so the lead on this was South Africa delivered some positive news on Omicron coronavirus variant on Friday. So this was last Friday, reporting a much lower rate of hospital admissions and signs that the wave of infections may be peaking. So that's what I'm saying. It goes up, big peak, flourishes like wildfire, and then starts to go down. That's what we're wanting to see. Now, South Africa's had it the longest. Eventually we'll be seeing this in the UK and Scandinavia, et cetera. And then North America will be after all of those guys. So only 1.7% of identified COVID-19 cases were admitted to hospital in the second week of the infectious fourth wave, compared with 19% at the same time during the third Delta wave. What this means is, if you're looking at an apples-to-apples comparison of weeks of when Delta hit its peak and when Omicron seemingly hit its peak, we got less than 2% of hospitalizations with Omicron, and we were still at 19% hospitalization with Delta. And Delta was kind of lower in many respects than the other types that were out there. So I think that, you know, this is, uh, this is good. Now, South— Southern Africa, meaning, you know, not just South Africa but the southern area of Africa, bit different demographics, but different penetrance of vaccination, all sorts of other stuff going on. But you can watch the initial outbreak location, at least for kind of the natural history. And if you're looking at maybe a lower amount of vaccination, and that is reportedly, you know, going to help us, you know, with spread and all that stuff, so South Africa should be in the worst shape. Um, they're doing pretty darn good. And so if we even follow what Southern Africa is doing, yeah, we're gonna have some bad times. We need a lot of people exposed. Uh, not very many people are gonna get real sick at all, and not very many people are gonna be hospitalized, et cetera. Um, this will go over. Now, a lot of illness in the middle, but more mild than not. And, uh, more non-hospitalized than not. So remember though, just statistically, that a faster spread means a relative increase in cases through the population and a relative increase in hospitalization rates. Remember, you know, the ratio is just bigger, so there's more red blocks going to the hospital, but there's more infection as well. Um, there also were, uh, published yesterday, uh, well, the notification was published yesterday, and I put the links in here to this. There were 2 studies that were published independently, uh, from Scotland and South Africa. And why is that important? ground one, the next step up. Uh, so the, uh, new data suggests that people infected with Omicron variant are markedly lower risk of hospitalization than those who contracted earlier versions of the virus. And, uh, see if there's anything else in the news story here. Um, in the one from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, uh, risk of hospitalization was 2/3 lower with Omicron than Delta. Okay, that's 2/3, 66%. That's great. In the South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases, Omicron-infected people were 70 to 80% less likely to need hospital than people infected with previous variants. So again, we're looking at, you know, very significant numbers. It's not like 10% less hospitalization. You're looking at, you know, conservatively 60 to 80%, maybe larger, uh, depending on the study that you look at. So I think that's also really good to remember. And one of the reasons, you know, because I, I mean, I obviously can't answer every question in the universe and wouldn't try, but, um, one of the things that I think is in the news. If you just look and listen to the news, uh, and I— because I report on these things, I do watch what a lot of news outlets are saying. And some of them are pretty straight up, you know, with the info. But like I say, nowadays where you got to get people's attention in, you know, half a second, and then you got to draw them into a story in 2 seconds, and then you got to keep them reading, you know, fear sells. And there's a lot of fear out there being sold. And one of the fear things is, well, This is spreading faster. It's going to get into more people. Remember the bigger green Lego thing? So yeah, it's going to get into more people. Ergo, um, if it's, you know, there's a lot of if statements, which are just guesses, right? If it's like Delta, we're going to go crazy and the hospitals are going to shut down and everyone's going to die. That is absolutely not what's going to happen. And even, you know, even the data from places with, you know, better and worse, uh, levels of vaccination are showing this is just— this is a minor percent hospitalizing disease. Now, you know, you don't want to overlook the fact that, you know, nobody wants to be hospitalized. So if you're one of those minor percent, that doesn't mean you don't matter. But on the whole, this sort of fear porn, you know, uh, uh, reporting that's going on, it's like, oh, you know, this, this this is the end and all that. Um, that's just not how it's going to go down. And there's no reason to believe, even though we're on— we are behind here in North America, we're behind, uh, the UK and, you know, certainly Southern Africa and, uh, you know, Scandinavia, uh, there's no reason to believe that we are going to have any different sort of experience with this, right? Now, one of the things I want to get into talking about, some of the therapeutics, but one of the things that almost every, uh, what I will say is not every non-government scientist, and what I mean by that is lower-level government scientists where their, their job is not tied to politics, and, and/or university people where their job is not dictated by politics. You do have to be careful with that. Um, but almost every, you know, scientific reviewer, uh, and, uh, person that, you know, has a track record with looking at these things and all that is looking at this from an immunology point of view. And I got into this last time in, in the first Omicron update, and so I'll just go over it a little bit here. But they're saying that Vaccinated or not, Omicron is going to be a herd immunity builder in that it will be just like having an immunization or a booster immunization when you do get it. And because both vaccinated and unvaccinated people are getting Omicron, albeit a minor disease, usually they are left with more robust immunity. And so some of the immunology experts are basically saying, in areas where there's not been a lot of vaccine-induced immunity, this will boost the native immunity, you know, by large factors. And in places where there has been a lot of vaccine immunity, it will boost the immunity by large factors, just in different ways. So I think it's really important to to remember that. Now, no one wants to get sick, but to be realistic, everybody's going to have their chance to be exposed to Omicron, whether you get symptoms from it or not, in North America in the next 6 weeks. You're just— you're gonna hear about more and more and more people getting sick with COVID and it's probably going to be Omicron. Most of those people will be able to isolate, self-treat at home, and do just fine. But what's going on on the drug front? Speaking of drugs and approvals and all of that business, well, again, from yesterday— now don't say I don't try and give you recent information. A lot of this stuff I was putting together right up till go time here to record and go live as I'm going live right now. So you folks on YouTube, it's maybe a day or two old, but this is pretty fresh stuff. So December 22nd. Emergency use approval to the Pfizer antiviral pill Paxlovid, and then in a, in a related note, molnupiravir, the Merck drug that doesn't work quite as well as the Pfizer drug. Both of those oral antiviral drugs are good to go through emergency use authorizations. And I've got the Links to those things there if you want them. Well, number one, I also have a link to my YouTube about the oral drugs and how they work and why they work and other drugs that work like them. But here's the thing to think about with these oral drugs: one of the things that makes an oral antiviral any antiviral really, but an oral antiviral work better is the sooner you get it in you when you start to. get sick. So one of the challenges they're going to have with Omicron is because we often don't know that we have it for a few days, and then when we do have it, we have sort of a mild illness, is how are we going to get the drug in us? You know, how will your doctor know? And this is something you have to work out with your doctor and your healthcare system, and I'm sure that they will have a way to do it. But like in that previous video, I made the example of, you know, back in, you know, the olden days when I did primary care, when the first influenza, you know, drugs came out, they got— they kind of got a bad rap, and they did have a lot of side effects. But in people that we could get, like, the first day that they showed positive for influenza, and we'd give them those drugs, it would shorten their influenza So you gotta, you know, you gotta get it before the viral load just goes crazy. But anyway, we got to the 2 oral antivirals I talked about in my previous episode are under emergency use approval, and they will be being used more and more, I have a feeling. Now, more emergency use antibody approvals. This is from about a week ago. Uh, US FDA issued EUA for AstraZeneca's Evushield, which is a monoclonal antibody that's mixed together, and it's for pre-exposure prophylaxis. So this is a drug that you're going to give somebody before they get sick. and before they are exposed. And it is very specifically not for people who've been exposed or have the disease. So how in the world is your doctor even going to know to do this? Well, it's not that they're, uh, sending out, you know, a free Ouija board to us doctors to say, uh, here, you know, try and figure out which of your patients need this pre-exposure prophylaxis. This drug that got the EUA is very specifically for people with compromised immune systems, And there's very specific criteria by which you give somebody this preventive antibody treatment. But one of the big ones, which I've brought up in other things, and I've said, you know, we, we don't have, um, we don't have a ton of, uh, you know, good modern treatments. Now let's not say there aren't treatments, but, you know, good modern approved treatments, let's just say, by the FDA for these people who are on immune-modulating drugs, meaning immune, you know, immune-blocking drugs. So a lot of people for their autoimmunity or cancer or whatever are on immune-inhibiting drugs, and we want them always to be the most protected people. If you are a high-risk individual and you're on an immune-blocking Drug, it might be appropriate for you to have one of these preventive antibody treatments because the last thing you might need, even though you know say Omicron is probably going to be the easiest one to fight through with the human immune system, last thing you need is an infection with anything else. So that's really what that new drug is all about. It's it's a it's a preemptive strike for somebody who has other risk factors, usually immune inhibiting drugs, of which a large portion of certain populations are on those drugs. Now we've got about 15 minutes left and there's still a number of pages here in my notes that I put together. I want to just talk a little bit about number 1, 2, you know, kind of a tale of 2 countries, if you will, and their response, uh, to what's going on and their response to Omicron specifically. And so the first country is going to be Australia. And I listened a number of times to the Prime Minister of Australia in the last couple of days, uh, and the first time I listened a number of times to the recording was because I almost fell off of my chair. Because if you think about just the response, you know, protocol in Australia, um, there's been this sort of, you know, uh, zero COVID kind of an idea. Uh, they have these, uh, you know, in, you know, detainment camps where, um, you know, they're sending folks, uh, to quarantine and other stuff like that, you know, some Pretty hardcore, right? So be that as it may, I made some quotes to the they're they're taking a big turn in Australia in their approach. And this is from the Prime Minister, and I just made some quotes from one of his recent addresses to his fellow Australians. So one of the things he said was we need to continue to calibrate how we respond. Meaning, maybe in the past our response has been a little uncalibrated. You know, and we have to be fair and and give grace to everybody. None of us knew how this was going to go. None of us really knew how the best way to respond was. We all had our opinions, and so countries and leaderships of countries kind of had to pick. Okay, I'm going to go, you know, high, medium, and low in this area. You know, you could go and you could look at China, and you know. in the beginning when they were bulldozing the roads into towns, uh, so no one could go in or out. Uh, that's a, you know, pretty heavy level of response, right? Uh, and, um, this— we will not have time to get into this today, but it's a pretty cool story except that it almost killed me. Um, I was actually in China in, uh, early 2019, uh, back during a time when now they're saying that, oops, maybe we did let the virus out and we didn't tell anybody. Uh, and I got at the very least a SARS, uh, viral infection, um, that almost killed me while, uh, while I was there and then for the next 3 months after I got home. But, uh, you know, the Chinese kind of have a different way of dealing with these things. This was certainly a minority thing when I was dealing with it back then. Um, so calibration of how you respond, and I believe since he's a prime minister, he's talking about, you know, we as the You know the global we, we Australians. We are not going back to lockdowns. That's something I didn't think I would ever hear in Australia because they've been very big on that. And we are turning now to common sense and responsibility. Wow! So, you know, kudos to anybody. It's hard to you know admit you need to make a ninety-degree turn and you know or a hundred and eighty-degree turn on your policies and. They're, they're doing it now. I know there's been some political pressure, uh, to do this, but they're doing it. Uh, and here's an important thing, I think, for a public official to say out loud: we will have more variants, and we need measures we all can live with. And the PM is trying to speak to people of all different opinions and approaches, etc. to dealing with the virus, okay? Because they are all one country, they're all Australians. There are going to be more of this to come. Yes, you heard it from the PM, you've heard it from me and a bunch of other people, uh, the SARS-CoV-2 virus in whatever form will be with you for the rest of your life. It will keep coming back like influenza, and our hope is it will keep downgrading itself and will build herd immunity. So that's really good common sense stuff here. We will have more variants. We need measures we can all live with. We need to move past the heavy hand of government and treat Australians like adults. That is the point. I actually paused the recording and backed that up a few times because, you know, at least in the popular press, like outside of China. Um, if you look at heavy hand of government, I mean, Australia's had some kind of heavy-handed things going on, and now they're saying, well, let's treat everyone like, you know, this is not a bad idea. Probably we need to move from a culture of mandates to a culture of responsibility, meaning personal responsibility. That's how we will live with this virus, and that is the way that I think we all have to globally think about it is this virus is keep— gonna keep popping up. Like, the idea of a, uh, of a zero-COVID world doesn't exist. It's, it's impossible. We'll get to that in a second. Um, and the other thing that they are doing is they are allowing for permissive infection, and that is in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. They know Omicron is going to go through the entire population, just like it is here. And they are just stepping back and stating that not only are we all going to be responsible, we're not going to be handing down top-down mandates and all that stuff that we did before, but also permissive infection means we are knowingly going to allow infection to move through our, our country. Because we can't stop it, and B, it will leave in its wake higher herd immunity and stronger herd immunity. So for what it's worth, the PM of, of no country speaks to me. So there you go. But kudos to them. Now, a scientist was looking at this information and said, you know, they're realizing— and this is not me, this I'm quoting another scientist. I've got a link to this, uh, this discussion actually if you want to listen to it. Can we vaccinate out of the virus? The scientist says— again, this is not me, this is another scientist— and they said if you had 100% efficacy of vaccine, 100% uptake, and no waning of vaccine effect— 3 things we don't have— then maybe you could. But because we do not have 100% efficacy of vaccines, we don't have 100% uptake, and we do have waning of vaccine effect, you will never be able to vaccinate the virus away. It's just— that's an impossibility. Now, that's not really the stated intention of vaccination programs, just so that you know. But there is this idea, I think, in, in, in earlier versions of certainly maybe the Australian or other governments that were thinking of this like zero-COVID idea, And now we're, you know, they're realizing that what the scientists are trying to tell them is the vaccines add a layer of protection through herd immunity and other stuff, and they do other protective things, but they don't make the virus go away. Okay, now another thing to keep in mind is why in the hell would you allow permissive infection to go through? Well, this is where the immunologists are saying Omicron is a chance to allow permissive infection and increase the native immunity in the most people. So it's like giving everyone a COVID booster shot without giving them a shot right now. If you already have, you know, vaccines, it adds on top. If you've already had COVID and you get a breakthrough infection, you know, with or without vaccines with Omicron, you know, it adds on to that. But the important thing to remember, and I've talked about this in other places, is The vaccines, at least the ones we have now, okay, the injection ones, give IgM and G antibodies but not IgA. Well, IgA is the first thing that we need when we breathe the COVID in. Natural infection builds up IgA antibodies, okay? This is why we get breakthrough infections. That's on the previous videos. So what they're looking at is, well, if we have permissive infection and people get— whether it's breakthrough infection or you're not vaccinated, you are vaccinated, whatever, and you get the Omicron and you process it through, you're going to have IgA antibodies also. You're going to be a target, a harder target to get. Okay, so more on IgA and GNM in the previous videos. I go into that, I give the links and all that business. Now we can contrast this idea of we need to get past the heavy hand of government, treat Australians like adults, move away from a culture of mandates to personal responsibility, all that stuff. for Australia. And the US response, sort of interesting, uh, this last 7 days. We have this, uh, quote from, um, the, um, government briefing at the White House. So this is the US, we're contrasting the US and Australia. Our vaccines work against Omicron, especially for people who get booster shots when they're eligible. If you're vaccinated, you can test positive, but if you get COVID, your case will likely be asymptomatic or wild or mild. Um, our vaccines kind of work against Omicron. Okay, let's be a little bit more clear about that. Okay, we'll get down to that. But this surprised me a little bit coming from the government. For the un— this is a quote— for the unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you will soon overwhelm. Oh, that's a pretty bold statement when we look at the other countries saying we need to move past the heavy hand of government, treat Australians like adults, move past culture of mandates to personal responsibility. And then, you know, we got this other country, the United States of America, saying if you're unvaccinated, you're looking at a winter of severe illness and death. For— this is literally what they said, uh, for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you will soon overburden. Overwhelmed. Now we talked about, at least for Omicron, who knows, a new variant could come change the whole thing. But no, like if you're talking about Omicron severe illness and death, that is not—it's not likely in the cards here, folks. So it's just interesting. It's not a political statement; it's just scientifically like that's this is the weirdest interpretation I have ever seen. And I've seen a lot of weird interpretations of information to come out and to take, you know, instead of what Australia is trying to do and say is we all come together as Australians. This is about personal responsibility. It's about protection. This is about each person doing you know the best thing that they can, and we're going to have permissive infections to boost your you know boost your immunity no matter what. Ha ha! You know rather that than and then you got this other country that comes out and says. We're making 2 groups of people in our country now. And that doesn't engender, you know, like shaming people into doing something is not always great. So basically the CDC, and I list, and I'm running out of time, but I list on here the link to the CDC actual thing about Omicron and vaccines. It says expect breakthrough infections. It says we expect that they'll work. They don't know. And, and right now, if we look at— I'm going to just go past the industry things because that's all just complete industry BS. If you look at real-world data, and I put in the research, in the, the place that has the best testing in the world, Denmark, they looked at almost 800 cases and 83% were vaccinated. Only 17% of the Omicron Omicron were unvaccinated. Now, that could be some artifact in there, but that's pretty big spread. And if you look, even a fair number of that group were triple vaccinated and they still got Omicron. Now, all of them, unvaccinated and vaccinated, had mild disease, but you're looking at, you know, say 80-plus percent and about 17%— 17% of unvaxxed and 80-plus percent vaccinated. percent of vaxxed. The other thing I want to put in, and you can read it yourself, but I think we want to look at some positive things, like what in the world can I do? One of the first studies, and it's listed here, on before you get COVID and your vitamin D level. We talked about vitamin D. So they took people that they weren't looking at COVID, they were just testing vitamin D levels, but then say, oh, we got all these vitamin D levels who got COVID. And they had 253 people that got COVID, and they looked, and low vitamin D was directly correlated with severe illness, hospitalization, and other bad things. So one of the things that you can do, and we've got other videos, and I've got newsletters on all this other stuff, is just get your vitamin D levels up. If you haven't had your levels checked, you're probably deficient. You can start taking vitamin D. And then, you know, talk to your doctor about getting tested at some point, but don't wait, okay, even with Omicron. So move forward. And then the final thing is, you know, there's a lot of other early treatments that can be thought of and considered. So I've focused in this thing, which I know a lot of people give me crap about, on the FDA-approved or emergency use authorized things and kind of the straight and narrow You know, medical approach, uh, to COVID, uh, even if it's permissive infection, which is going to happen whether the government— can't stop permissive infection. It's just you're going to get it, right? This is going to happen. Um, so, you know, regardless of that, um, doing things we talked about in other videos, and I'm about to get the electronic hook and have to go off here, but, you know, getting enough sleep, hydrating, all that stuff. Will it make you not get COVID? No, don't be— we need to not be stupid, okay? But if we have this data that shows that just by having a good vitamin D level, if I do get it, I am very unlikely to get bad disease, why not, right? And there's many other things like vitamin C and all the other stuff that we talked about in the other programs. So please, please, please, you know, whether or not, you know, you're in a country I'm in the United States right now where they're sort of threatening everyone and all of this stuff and sort of ignoring a lot of the science, or if you're in a country that's saying we're going with personal responsibility, it doesn't matter. You do you. We all need to do what we're supposed to do. And as I always say, this is not an anti or pro vaccine thing, not anti or pro anything. I'm just giving you information. You make your healthcare decisions with your healthcare providers. Remember what I always say, getting healthcare information from people on TV or YouTube or the radio is stupid. You need to take that into your calculus and work with whoever you work with to get your healthcare decisions. But I have buzzed through an awful lot here. This is Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul. Please like, share, and subscribe. Uh, let other people know about the channel. We do a lot of this. We do a lot of short-form videos and other cool things to give you more information about your health. I will see you all on the radio again next week, and if I don't, Happy New Year.