"The scariest answer I've heard this year": Waleed Aly's Omicron shock
Image: The Project
Leading US epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding has issued a dire warning to those unconcerned about the new Omicron variant, saying that the notion that this strain is a milder version of the disease is a “sweet little lie”.
Appearing on Monday’s episode of The Project, Feigl-Ding’s worrying predictions clearly rattled host Waleed Aly, who dubbed one of the public health scientist’s responses “the scariest answer I’ve heard this year.”
Feigl-Ding told The Project hosts that with a new variant circulating, Australians should be vaccinating children “as soon as possible”.
“There’s been a lot of misinformation last year that kids can’t be infected, kids are immune – that’s not true. If anything, the Delta variant is much more severe in children, hospitalisation rates are much higher, and that’s before Omicron,” he said.
“Kids do get sick, kids do get hospitalised and they do die. Please protect them against Omicron – vaccinating them is of the highest urgency.”
The Project panellist Peter Helliar then asked where we might be in the life of this pandemic, prompting a dispiriting answer from Feigl-Ding, who says it is “far from over,” pointing to what he called a “vaccine apartheid” in regions like southern Africa, where new variants are able to emerge in populations with low vaccination rates.
Feigl-Ding noted that the WHO had already announced they may switch to using stars and constellations if they run out of Greek letters to name Covid variants – a fact that left host Aly stunned.
“I am petrified that the thing they went to after the Greek alphabet was the universe," he said, referring to the new variant's name. "As though we needed something that infinite to capture what might happen in the pandemic. That is the scariest answer I think I’ve heard this year.”
Not all medical experts share Feigl-Ding’s views on Omicron – one leading voice even believes Omicron could, counterintuitively, spell “the end of Covid”.
“I actually think there is a silver lining here, and this may signal the end of Covid-19, with it attenuating itself to such an extent that it is highly contagious but does not cause severe disease. That’s what happened with Spanish flu,” says Dr Richard Friedland, CEO of the Netcare Group, which operates more than 50 hospitals in South Africa.