COVID-19: Current state of affairs, Omicron, and a search for the end game

The vaccines... are 70% effective against symptomatic COVID. 10 weeks after a booster, it goes down to 35% for Pfizer and 45% from Moderna. So, within 10 weeks, you're seeing even the booster wear off against your ability to test positive or have a symptomatic case, but those memory B-cells and T-cells are still working. The cellular immunity is still protecting against severe illness.

We still have doctors telling folks 'Oh, you have COVID. Tough it out. Stay at home.' You know what? We should be telling them... fluvoxamine reduces mortality by 91%; budesonide, a steroid inhaler, markedly reduces hospitalization; vitamin D has been found to be correlated with severity of illness in a German study in hospitalized patients; hypertonic saline is an age-old treatment that's been used to sort of rinse out the nasal cavity, and it's been used by doctors for a long time with many viruses.

It may be that Omicron is nature's vaccine. It is far more mild. And for the 93% of the population living in poor countries in the world, they don't have access to a vaccine right now ... So, a lot of people out there are going to get vaccinated essentially by getting Omicron.

The other interesting thing about this particular pandemic... 99.6% or whatever of people are going to get better no matter what. In other words, staying home and doing nothing, they're probably going to be just fine.

...Children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.

I think one of the great mistakes we made as a medical community was to suggest that somehow being vaccinated was going to eliminate that risk of transmission, and we've set that expectation. And now people run around saying they don't work when, in fact, the vaccines are very effective in downgrading the severity of illness.

Measuring circulating antibodies and saying you know everything about a person's immunity is sort of like looking in a person's bank account and saying you know everything about their net worth.

Omicron is not infecting lung cells, neither lung individual cells or what we call organoids in a lab ... It's about 90% less efficient in replicating in those lung cells.

I think the idea of asymptomatically testing athletes is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. Like, we're going to just test everybody in the NFL and NBA and NHL and NCAA. It's like, seriously? What is the logic of this?