We don't know that for sure right now, this is really something that's in motion and we just arranged right now a discussion between our scientists and the South African scientists, a little bit later in the morning to really get the facts – because you're hearing a lot of things back and forth.

Anthony Fauci

National Institute of Allergy has what we call a doubling time of about three days. And if you do the math on National Institute of Allergy, if you have just a couple of percentage of the isolates being Omicron, very soon it's going to be the dominant variant.

The vulnerable people are the people who have not been vaccinated, and I hope that the possibility that we're seeing -- that we're going to be getting a surge of Omicron, which is almost inevitable given its characteristic of high degree of transmissibility, we have the tools to be able to blunt this. We just need to implement them.

We are already in a Delta surge. I mean, the cases are going up, and 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 a highly transmissible virus.

If we didn’t have these tools, I would be telling you to really, really be worried.

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.

The message remains clear : If you are unvaccinated, get vaccinated, and particularly in the arena of Omicron, if you are fully vaccinated, get your booster shot.

If it becomes necessary to get yet another boost, then we’ll just have to deal with it when that occurs.

I’m hoping from an immunological standpoint that that third shot of an mRNA and the second shot of a JJ will give a much greater durability of protection than just the six months or so that we’re seeing right now.

It's tough to tell because the third shot of an mRNA could not only do what we absolutely know it does, is it dramatically increased the level of protection. But from an immunological standpoint, it could very well increase the durability of protection by things that you can't readily measure by the level of antibodies that you might have a maturation of the immune system that would prolong the durability.

Thus far, it does not look like there’s a great degree of severity to it, but we have really got to be careful before we make any determinations that it is less severe or it really doesn’t cause any severe illness, comparable to delta.

That ban was done at a time when we were really in the dark – we had no idea about what was going on, except that there had been an explosion of cases of omicron in South Africa.

Just as I said and I'll say it again, if Monday Dr. Anthony Fauci have a vaccinated situation, enjoy the holidays with Monday Dr. Anthony Fauci family in a family setting.

Our experience with variants such as the Delta variant is that even though the vaccine isn't specifically targeted to the Delta variant, when you get a high enough level of an immune response, you get spillover protection, even against a variant that the vaccine wasn't specifically directed at, that's the reason why we feel even though we don't have a lot of data on it, there's every reason to believe that that kind of increase that you get with the boost would be helpful, at least in preventing severe disease of a variant like Omicron.

We're working on it, this will end.

I certainly was not aware of his test positivity or negativity.

We knew that it was just a matter of time before the first case of omicron would be detected in the United States.

The answer is yes, that’s a different issue.

That will give you a pretty good idea as to what the level of immune evasion is. That process will take likely two weeks or more, perhaps even sooner, depending upon how well the virus grows in the isolates that we get, and in those countries in which there are a lot of cases like South Africa, the computational biologists and the evolutionary biologists are going to be getting a good feel as to what the competition of this virus would be with Delta. Those are just a few of the things that will take a couple of weeks to a few weeks to learn.

One of the things you do is you get the virus and you grow it or you put it into a modified form called a pseudovirus. And when you do that, you can then get convalescent plasma, monoclonal antibodies, as well as sera and antibodies that are induced by the vaccine to see if they neutralize the virus.

Right now it does not look like there's a big signal of a high degree of severity.