Betcha's media presents. Madame Speaker, Madame Vice President. You want to hang out with us and get your back seat?

And so I went to human resources. There are some things I just can't tell you on air.

The Betcha's sub podcast. A woman's problem if you will.

Hello everybody, it's Amanda and I am back here today with a special Friday bonus episode to chat

with Dr. Abdul-Elsaid, a physician, epidemiologist, CNN contributor and the author of the newsletter,

The Incision. Thank you for being here. What a week it's probably been for you.

Yeah, it's been a pretty busy week, but glad to be here with you.

Yeah, awesome. So I want to get right to it. So we are chatting on Thursday afternoon.

I think a lot of us began to hear about the Omicron variant over the weekend last Friday.

How has our understanding of this variant evolved since the beginning of the week?

Well, what's happened more than anything else is that it's just spread, which tends to mean that some

of the hypotheses that we've had about the relative transmissibility seem to be being confirmed

in real time. At the same time, we still don't have quality studies that really tell us just how

much more transmissible this may be. Similarly, the other question beyond transmissibility that a lot

of folks are asking and not to be asking is about vaccine escape. And it's important that the first

two cases in the United States were both vaccinated people suggesting that two doses of the vaccine

may not be enough and putting an exclamation point on the need to get boosted. And a lot of folks

may be thinking, well, if two vaccines aren't enough, how are you sure that getting boosted is

so much more helpful? In some respects, you think about the old parable of the blind folks in the

elephant, each trying to touch one different piece of the elephant. It's kind of like our immune

cells and the virus. And the more times that our immune cells see the piece of the virus that's

generated by the mRNA that our vaccines offer it, the better a handle on what they're fighting, the

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