Top South African Doctor Confirms No Evidence Omicron Variant More Harmful Than Delta As G-7 Pushes "Urgent Action"

Having set off the latest global COVID panic, this time focusing on the omicron strain, which was hastily labeled a variant of concern by the WHO over the long holiday weekend in the US, South Africa's top epidemiologists now find themselves in the awkward position of having to walk back all - or at least some - of the hysteria first unleashed by news of the omicron variant.

Of course, this notion isn't exactly news, as plenty of experts inside South Africa and elsewhere have warned over the weekend that the new variant might be more mild, if also more transmissible, than previous variants.

After the UK confirmed its first cases of the omicron variant and added a handful of southern African countries to its travel "Red list", in effect shutting down travel between the region and the UK, the G-7 has just decided to issue its own warning about the new "Variant of concern".

Therefore today G7 Health Ministers held an urgent meeting to discuss developments with regard to concerns related to the Omicron variant.

All the while, Dr. Anthony Fauci is seizing the opportunity to use the new strain as a boogeyman to push Americans to get their booster shots, one of the SA doctors who helped discover the strain is now seeing her comments amplified as the WHO criticizes the travel bans imposed by western nations on south African countries impacted by the new variant, which was first identified in South Africa from cases discovered in Botswana.

At least, symptoms appear to be mild, and while hospitalizations have begun to rise in South Africa, it's unclear whether the variant is driving this, or whether it's a result of a recent uptick in cases that's only partly driven by the variant.

Put another way....Let us be clear: to this point, there is not one shred of evidence that Omicron is more deadly than delta or the original variant.
 

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/top-south-african-doctor-confirms-no-evidence-omicron-variant-more-harmful-delta