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This is the Tom Hartman program.

And welcome to the program on the line with us, our old buddy, Dr. Eric Feigelding, the epidemiologist

and health economist with the New England Complex Systems Institute, the first whistle blower

on the COVID pandemic, former faculty member and researcher at the Harvard Medical School and the

Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, FAS.org. His Twitter handle is Dr. Eric Ding, D-R-E-R-I-C-D-I-N-G,

and Dr. Feigelding, welcome back to the program. It's so nice to have you with us. It seems like

the disease situation out there is starting to get wild again, is it the season?

Yeah, it is, unfortunately. One of these days, you need to call me back when it's not crazy COVID.

There you go. So, let's break this out and break it down, just to start out with COVID,

the thing that you and I first started talking about a couple of years ago, and I know it's

so on top of over the years. What is the current state of COVID? How lethal are the current strains

of COVID? How contagious is it? What kind of threat does it represent to us?

There's a new variant that is currently causing a worldwide surge. It's called JN.1.

JN1. So, this JN1 variant is highly evasive against pre-existing immunity. Now, the vaccines

that we got that I hope everyone got the new annual booster shots. It's an XBB

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