'Good News': mRNA Inventor Says Omicron Looks Like Something Vaccinologist Would Design for Purpose
Vaccine scientist Dr. Robert Malone believes there is some very good news emerging from the rapid spread of the COVID omicron variant, suggesting that God may have given the world a “Christmas present.”
Malone helped invent the mRNA technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines.
Appearing on the Fox News program “The Ingraham Angle” shortly before Christmas, the doctor stated omicron may well do what vaccines have not been able to fully accomplish to date: provide strong immunity.
“Omicron blows right through the vaccines and through the triple jab,” Malone said, referring to the two-round initial shots and the booster.
“Now here’s the good news,” he continued. “The number of deaths from omicron worldwide is less than 10 [by] my last count.”
“If you believe in a God, this looks an awful lot like a Christmas present,” Malone said, pointing out that rather than going into the deep lungs as delta and other prior variants does, which can lead to serious illness, omicron has shifted to the upper airway, indicating the virus is weakening.
“So the good news with omicron is very low disease, highly infectious. It looks an awful lot to the experienced vaccinologist like a live-attenuated virus vaccine that you might design for purpose,” he contended. “It’s going to elicit a strong mucosal immune response.”
“This is about as good as we could possibly want right now in terms of outcomes.”
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Appearing again on the “Ingraham Angle” Monday night, Malone explained just how infectious omicron is.
“It has a reproductive coefficient, with a measure of infectiveness that’s in the range of measles. It’s in the seven to 10 range,” he said.
In other words one infected person will, on average, spread it to seven to 10 more people.
Malone explained on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, by comparison the average rate of transmission for delta was five to six people.
“We’re all going to get infected,” Malone told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “Probably the only ones that won’t have some degree of symptoms from this in the United States are going to be the ones that have natural immunity. Still a fraction of those are going to get infected.”
The doctor’s observation about the infectiousness of omicron appears to be playing out in the United States.
The New York Times tracker shows the number of COVID cases, which is likely both delta and omicron, topped one million on Monday for the first time since the pandemic began.
The highest daily total during previous nationwide spike in January 2021 was approximately 250,000.
However, Reuters noted last week that COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations in the U.S. are “comparatively” low even as omicron surges.
Additionally, The New York Times reported the omicron wave has passed quickly through South Africa with no huge spike in deaths.
A study out of South Africa showed patients admitted to hospitals during the country’s omicron-dominant fourth wave of COVID were 73 percent less likely to have severe disease than patients admitted during the delta-dominant third wave.
Here in the U.S., Bloomberg reported, “A string of new studies has confirmed the silver lining of the omicron variant: Even as case numbers soar to records, the numbers of severe cases and hospitalizations have not.”
Monica Gandhi, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Bloomberg, “I hope this variant creates profound immunity in the population.”
“It will hopefully end the pandemic.”
