Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Global USA There's been a lot of concern and discussion about the decision to block travel from southern Africa. The Africans are feeling like they're being punished as a result of their transparency in getting this information out quickly. I totally understand their concern and I do hope that this travel ban will be quite temporary. On the other hand in typical fashion the far right is now criticizing me together with President Biden for using the Omicron variant as a political tool against the Republicans. I have no idea how they make this connection, but they are totally crazy. In addition, I got criticized by the New York Post for being too slow in considering a travel restriction and therefore likely caused loss of life. Obviously, this is a lose lose situation. Had a very important conversation with Trevor Bedford last night. Trevor is a computational biologist in Seattle. He discussed some models for John Mascola, Larry Corey, and others by zoom at 8:00 PM last night. He is concerned about the immune evasion capabilities of this virus but admits that it is too early to tell what the ultimate impact will be. He believes that in a delta-immune population such as in the United States that it is very likely that this new variant will spread widely and be dominant by the time we get to the end of February. However, he underscores that this is purely an estimate on his part based on his model and may not turn out to be the case. We still do not know with the level of severity of his viruses and only time will tell. By assaying on whole virus and pseudovirus, we will have a determination in the next two to three weeks regarding the degree of immune evasion. PRESS; MSNBC with Craig Melvin; NPR with Rob Stein; Part 6 – Continued from Part 5