Ashish Jha on Covid-19: On the Omicron Variant and the Outlook for 2022

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Where do things stand with Covid-19? How has the emergence of the Omicron variant changed the situation? What can we expect in the short term and throughout 2022? To discuss these questions, we are joined again by Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. While noting that much still remains unknown about the Omicron variant, Jha suggests that the United States likely will be in for a challenging few months: We have a lot of data that Omicron is going to spread very rapidly. But that doesn’t answer the question as to whether it’s more contagious inherently, or is it evading our immune response. It’s probably a combination of both. There is now pretty clear data that our vaccines will be pushed to the wall on this. The good news, according to Jha, is our vaccines—especially taken with booster doses—likely will maintain strong protection against hospitalization and serious illness. The bad news is there still are a relatively large number of unvaccinated Americans who are particularly vulnerable. While explaining the situation, Jha also shares his perspective on the public policy and public health choices we have faced in recent months. Jha reflects on what he views as significant failures of the government, particularly the pace of the rollout of boosters and rapid tests. Finally, Jha and Kristol discuss possible paths forward in 2022 and what data we should keep our eyes on from the UK and the rest of the globe.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm pleased to be joined again by Dr. Shisha,
0:20.7	Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, very prominent and commentator on our
0:26.8	current public health challenges and has been a very accurate and I'm and informed one in my
0:33.1	opinion for the last couple of years. This is our fourth conversation. The third one for the
0:38.4	late July stands up well all too well in terms of your worries about the Delta variant and
0:44.8	concerns that we weren't out of the woods yet. I guess I put it that way, but here we're speaking on
0:49.6	December 13th. I would welcome you back. I've got to say I sort of look forward to when we don't have
0:54.3	to have these conversations quite as often as I'm sure you do. Nothing personal, but it's not
0:59.4	assigned to things are going great. Anyway, welcome Shisha. Thanks for joining me.
1:04.1	Thanks for having me back. It is a pleasure and I hope we get to do one where we just reflect on
1:08.8	all of this in the rearview mirror and not talk about where we are, but that's not that's not
1:14.3	an luxury we're afforded yet. No, I look forward to that very much, but there is a big public policy
1:20.0	lessons, I think, in public health lessons and governmental lessons and civil society lessons
1:24.2	to be learned from this, which is you say it's a little hard to step back and do that right now.
1:27.9	So we're mid-December, December 13th, 2021. We're still dealing with the Delta surge and now we've
1:35.6	got Omicron. Where are we? How worried should we be? How much worse are things that we thought
1:42.4	they might be? How worried are you about the next few months? Let's say I'm concerned. I'm not,
1:48.1	I think there are a couple of issues that worry me a lot. I think there are a couple areas where
1:53.9	people are maybe worrying unnecessarily, but let's talk about where we are today. So December 13th,
2:01.6	I looked at the data early this morning as I often do early. The morning on just number of
2:05.6	infections, hospitalizations, that's in the US. We're about 120,000 infections today.
2:12.3	What's interesting is we saw a rebound after Thanksgiving exactly as we expected,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Bill Kristol, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Bill Kristol and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.