The NPR Politics Podcast - What Do You Need To Know About Omicron? Biden Says Be Concerned But Don't Panic

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

A new Covid-19 variant called Omicron is spreading throughout the world and public health officials are worried about its transmissibility. President Biden addressed the nation saying, "this variant is a cause for concern — not a cause for panic." But the variant is reigniting anxieties about the pandemic.This episode: White House Correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, and health correspondent Allison Aubrey.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, NPR Politics. This is Andrew in Raleigh, New Jersey, and I'm currently on my way to close on my very first home while trying my absolute best not to get sick from the nerves. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 p.m. on Monday, the 29th of November. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully I'll officially be a first-time homeowner who is able to keep his breakfast down. Enjoy the show. Ah, congratulations. owner who was able to keep his breakfast down. Enjoy the show. Congratulations. It's stressful. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And you all probably got the news alerts over the weekend about a new COVID-19 variant of concern called Omicron. Though I guess, Scott, you didn't because you have turned off all alerts. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Years ago. I recommend nobody have alerts on their phones. I had a lot of questions about this Omicron, including how to pronounce it. Not Omnicron. Like the president pronounced it. Like a transformer.

We don't know a lot about it, but we do know that it has sparked new travel restrictions, and it has certainly reignited anxieties about the pandemic, which is why we have Allison Aubrey here from NPR's health team back to help us sort through it all. Hey, Allison. Hey, Tam. Hey, Scott. Good to be here. Let's start with the basics. What do we know about it? Well, the earliest known case was spotted in Botswana. Scientists in South Africa have helped to spread the word about it, where it has been spreading. It's now been found in a bunch of countries, the UK, Israel, several other European countries, and also now in Canada, two cases in

Ontario as of last night. And though there are lots of travel restrictions, as you pointed out, it is very tough to stop the spread. So it has not been identified in the U.S. yet, but it's likely just a matter of time. And right now, the concern is really that this new variant has many mutations. And why, you might ask, is that important? Well, without getting too technical, the mutations are on the spike protein. That's the part of the virus that kind of facilitates or opens the door to let the virus into our cells where it needs to get in order to replicate and make us sick. So bottom line, all these mutations may enable the virus to spread faster. Here's Dr.

Anthony Fauci. He spoke about this yesterday on NBC. The profile of the mutation strongly suggests that it's going to have an advantage in transmissibility and that it might evade immune protection that you would get, for example, from a monoclonal antibody. That, together with the fact that it just kind of exploded in the sense that when you look in South Africa, you were having a low level of infection and then all of a sudden there was this big spike. And when the South Africans looked at it, they said, oh, my goodness, this is a different virus than we've been dealing with. And, you know, all of this comes on top of what we already have, which is a surge of infections in Europe,

a rise in cases in the U.S. in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Right. Scott, President Biden addressed the nation on this this morning. He also took some questions. But here is the clip that the White House wants us all to hear. This variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic. Scott, what was his message? I think it's pretty notable that he came out and gave this big speech when there aren't that many answers, because I think more than anything else, the message from the White House that it's hoping to get across is we are taking this seriously. We are organizing as much as we need to and hopefully way more than we need to. travel restrictions that went in place, which South Africa was pretty angry about saying, hey, look, this thing's all over the world probably anyway. We just happened to identify it very quickly. There was frustration on the other end of this travel ban. Biden acknowledged

that this is not a perfect solution. This is more about slowing down transmission than anything else. Then he went on to make the point that we just heard. He yet again urged people to be vaccinated and boosted. I think there's a real question of if you are not vaccinated or boosted at this point door to, again, making it clear it is not needed yet. But if it is, saying, look, if worse comes to worse, this is a variant that our current vaccines do not protect well against. The federal government will put resources in place and do what it can to make sure a new round of vaccines would be available as quickly as is safely possible. I think that is the clip that the White House does not want us to focus on, even though they said it. But this boiled down to, we're on it. But yet at the same

time, a lot of the on it things were things that he's been doing for months now. Right. No, I agree with that. I mean, you know, he was trying to say, look, we can handle this. We got vaccines, we got medicines, we're going to be able to tackle this. But by opening the door to that possibility, he's acknowledging that the vaccines may need to be reformulated. I mean, Moderna is already out saying, look, it'll take us, you know, a few months to do this. This is kind of the beauty of the mRNA technology. They're sort of a plug and play element. They sequence the genome and then they can actually quickly retool the vaccine to target this Omicron variant. So, you know, he probably brought it up because he's sort of saying, like, even if that happens, we have a of had a variation on this conversation before, which makes sense because there have been other variants.

This isn't the first variant. There have been discussions of developing a booster for other variants that then sort of fizzled out. Can we go back to some of the questions we don't have answers to? Like, is Omicron more severe? Is it more transmissible? What do we know? You know, I think it's really going to take several weeks for these answers to unfold, and they will unfold kind of iteratively. So right now, infectious disease experts are tracking the

severity of cases in South Africa and Israel and other places to just get a better sense of how sick people are getting from this variant, both vaccinated people and unvaccinated people. You know, at the same time, scientists are basically, you know, taking the plasma of vaccinated people to see if the antibodies in their blood can fend off this virus. And if that happens, it's a good sense that people who are fully vaccinated could be well protected. So, you know, these are the kinds of things that are going to be answered over the next few weeks. Yeah. And I guess you're also saying we don't really know how well our vaccines would protect any of us from severe infection or infection at all. Yeah, absolutely.

And there is an assumption right now at this moment that, you know, by infectious disease experts and among the vaccine makers, they all say they expect that fully vaccinated people will be protected against this variant to some extent. But, you know, it's the extent to which that happens that really is in question. And that would determine whether or not the boosters need to be sort of recalibrated. And that would become a very messy situation, right? Because then you would have people who've been fully boosted. So then should they then get a booster against Omicron? Or, you know, what if Delta is still around, and it hasn't completely out-competed Omicron? Would you need a multivalent

booster, kind of like the flu shot that has all these different, you know, variants that is targeted to multiple variants, it becomes pretty complicated pretty quickly. It feels to me, and again, this is hypothetical, and we shouldn't talk about this again until the facts line it up. But it just feels to me that would be such a politically tenuous situation if that were to happen, right? Because I feel like already you are seeing an increased partisan split from some quarters of there was this promise that vaccines would make everything better. Now the boosters are in play. Now it's how many more shots can you urge people to get?

And I feel like that would be an incredibly hard sell for the White House to make if that road happened. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, more about this next phase of the pandemic. And we're back. And I want to get a little bit into the politics and the science. Biden was asked about whether more lockdowns or shutdowns or other restrictions could be in the future as Omicron presumably arrives in the United States. And he was pretty clear that that's not the direction he's headed. Yeah, yeah. His basic message was, the U.S. has a lot more tools than it did before. If these tools are deployed smartly,

there is not a need for that. I mean, the key line was if people are vaccinated and wear their mask, there's no need for a lockdown. Look, we've been talking about this among ourselves and on the podcast for a long time now. I continue to just be struck by the fact that the Biden White House lives in this world where every single person wears a mask. But increasingly, that is not the world that most Americans live in. I mean, so many people were traveling this weekend because I've been obsessed with this question. I was keeping track of what congressional district I was in when I was stopping and looking around. And by and large, even in incredibly Democratic suburban districts, masks were few and far between. So I think there is a growing disconnect between White House and CDC and everything else messaging on this and reality. And I think we're going to see if that's a problem going forward. A few other countries in Europe, even before Omicron was a thing, were increasing restrictions.

And Zients was insistent that, no, we're not going back that direction. We're not going back to lockdowns. The economy is going to continue chugging forward. It just seems like politically untenable in the United States to even contemplate some of the things that are being discussed in Europe. I think there's no appetite for that. And I do think what is likely to happen is I'd be surprised if the CDC didn't weigh in more strongly this week with a masking message. I mean, already, you know, Dr. Walensky has said people should be masking in areas where there is, you know,

higher substantial levels of spread. Well, that's a large chunk of the country right now. Of course, these decisions are up to local public health leaders. But I would be very surprised given this moment if we didn't hear something more forceful on masking from the CDC this week, especially given what we just heard the president said three times during the appearance today. He basically said, look, we don't need lockdowns. We have masking, we have vaccines. He made a point of saying, I recommend, you know, you put your mask on. I think the optics of it and the messaging coming from Biden is like, let's go back to the basics. Let's do the things we know how to do and simple things, you know, handwashing, masking. I want to ask about this moment that we're in, because we're headed into the holidays. There are Hanukkah parties. I went

to one last night. This is a very different year than it was last year, even with this sort of looming, potentially scary thing of concern out there. It's a very different year than it was last year. I mean, we're in a better situation, mostly because we have 74% of eligible people vaccinated with at least one shot. We also have multiple medications and transfusions to help treat people infected with coronavirus. Tomorrow, for instance, FDA advisors will consider the new Merck pill, which the company says, you know, prevents serious illness and death by about 30% or so. So we're in a much better situation on one hand. On the other hand, I think everybody would be tone deaf to not look at the numbers and what's happening right now. I mean, cases have been going down, down, down, down, down in October. They've been going up, up, up, up, up in November. What I've been hearing from modelers is,

look, we will have a rise, we'll have a fall. It will not be as intense as last year, given the level of vaccination. Deaths were rising, rising, rising in the weeks after Thanksgiving last year. That is not expected to happen. We may see some increases in deaths, but likely nowhere near the level seen last winter. And all of this does create political challenges for the President of the United States. What do you what are we expecting to hear from him in the coming days? Look, I think one of the biggest challenges is that Biden has a limited toolkit on this going forward, right? We talked about the fact that there is just no sustainable political climate for for intense lockdowns.

I think if schools started to close again, a lot of parents would lose their minds. And what you heard today from Biden kind of shows that there is not much to do at this particular moment other than say the same things he's been saying since he was the president elect and trying to act like the president during the beginning of that wave last winter, urging people to be safe, urging people to be smart, and urging people to get vaccinated. You know, like Allison said, if we're talking about three-quarters of Americans vaccinated already, there's not much more that these public pleas can do. So I think it's trying to look like the White House is on it,

praying that this thing isn't as bad as they're preparing that it could be. And other than that, just kind of a more limited version of where we were a year ago, waiting for the science to move quickly. Yeah. All right. Well, we are going to leave it there for now. Allison Aubrey, thanks for joining us and attempting to answer our questions. Yeah, it's great to be here. Even though some are unanswerable. Yeah, that's right. Thanks for having me. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.