A good friend sent me an article this morning about OMICRON, the new Covid variant, which I was reading about last night. As I read the article, I began to scrunch my face. Sure enough, at the end I saw it was written by Umair Haque, a popular but sensational, and imho, a too inaccurate, journalist. He also writes inaccurately and unrealistically pessimistically about climate crisis and government.

Haque paints a dramatic and doomist view of the new variant into this winter based on inaccurate data (from my research of good science)—he says that Pfizer vaccine after 6 months is all but ineffective and boosters drop quickly in efficacy (the first is largely untrue and for the second, we don't know these things yet about the booster because it's too new, but other boosters for other illnesses, have shown to stabilize antibody levels at a high level). Umair also predicts a bleak future of winters to come, which is further unfounded.

Long story short, let's all take some deep breaths and not jump on the doomist bandwagon (but certainly and swiftly, preventively prepare) before we know what is going on. Authorities have acted swiftly to mitigate the spread of Omicron and other epidemiologists point to the similar location of the antigenic site mutations in Omicron vs. Delta and previous mutated strains, which is promising for vaccine effectiveness.

Omicron may be (very) bad news but we don't know enough about it yet, including its prevalence of spread. Similar scares were propagated about Gamma and Mu variants in the past, which amounted to little. In the meantime, get a booster and stay safe.