The cases are going up. We have an average of about 117,000 cases. We have an increase in the percentage of hospitalizations. Deaths are still over a thousand, then you have, looking over your shoulder, The Omicron variant, which we know, from what's going on in South Africa and in the UK, is The Omicron variant.

Anthony Fauci

What the CDC has said -- and it gets misinterpreted -- they're saying, wearing any mask is better than no mask at all, but there is a gradation of capability of preventing you from getting infected and from you transmitting it to someone else. So we should be wearing the best possible masks that we can get. That's a fact.

If you can tolerate an N95, do it. If you want to get a KN95, fine. And what the CDC has said -- and it gets misinterpreted -- but they're saying, wearing any mask is better than no mask at all, but there is a gradation of capability of preventing you from getting infected and from you transmitting it to someone else. So we should be wearing the best possible masks that we can get. That's a fact.

Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody.

You keep coming back to personal attacks on me that have absolutely no relevance to reality.

And they asked the police to ask him where he was going, and he was going to Washington, D.C., to kill Dr. Fauci.

So you are making a catastrophic epidemic for your political gain.

If you are asymptomatic, and you're infected, we want to get people back to the jobs, particularly those with essential jobs, to keep our society running smoothly.

I think United States's too premature to be talking about a fourth dose, one of the things that we're going to be following very carefully is what the durability of the protection is following the third dose of an mRNA vaccine.

The CDC is very well aware there has been some pushback about that, looking at it again, there may be an option in that that testing could be a part of that. And I think we’re going to be hearing more about that in the next day or so from the CDC.

You're right, people are getting concerned about why not test people at that time.

NIH-funded studies that are ongoing right now in both mouse and hamsters confirm the lesser virulence in the animal model. And, studies here at the Vaccine Research Center at NIH, in the nonhuman primate model, are ongoing and will await results of that.

What we hope to get it at is such a low level that even though it isn't completely eliminated, it doesn't have a major impact on public health or on the way we run our lives, so if we get more people vaccinated globally and more people vaccinated now, hopefully within a reasonable period of time, we will get to that point where it might occasionally be up and down in the background, but it won't dominate us the way it's doing right now.

I would imagine, given the size of our country, and the diversity of vaccination versus not vaccination, that it likely will be more than a couple of weeks, probably by the end of January, I would think.

And what we mean by that: if a child goes into the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when, in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s over counting the number of children who are, quote, hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID.

Why we emphasize the importance of booster shots — the anti-Omicron activity is about 20 - to 40-fold higher in sera from boosted vaccines versus the peak in individuals who had a two-dose vaccine.

Bottom line message here is that boosters bring back up that degree of protection to a level that is approximating what it was before.

If Leana Wen plans are to go to a 40-to-50-person New Year's Eve party with all the bells and whistles and everybody hugging and kissing and wishing each other a Happy New Year ? I would strongly recommend that, this year, we do not do that.

The tests are still worthwhile. Don't let anybody think that the FDA was saying that tests are no longer good. They say they're less sensitive now. They never were 100 % sensitive, what the FDA is saying today is that when you look at Omicron and its ability to detect Omicron, some of the tests have a diminution, further, of the sensitivity, but they still say the tests are useful and should be used.

There's no way I’m going to walk away from this until we get this under control, i mean, that's the purpose of what we do. That's -- that's our mission in life. In the middle of it, I’m not going to walk away.

With the sheer volume of new cases... one of the things we want to be careful of is that we don't have so many people out.