Briefly Noted: Omicron v. Delta
Some links I picked up via Robert Malone suggest that Ominous Omicron is, comparatively speaking, not so ominous. It may be, as some have already suggested, good news—epidemiologically speaking.
The first item reports lab findings. This comes in a five part Twitter thread. I’ll post the initial tweet, followed by two excerpts. As you’ll see, the findings correlate with the those from the five articles that Malone summarizes (below):
3. What does this all mean? Efficient infection of lung cells could correlate with severity of lung disease. Syncitia or fused cells are often seen in respiratory tissues taken following severe disease. Delta was very good at both, in contrast to Omicron. Further work is needed
5. In summary this work suggests that Omicron does appear to have become more immune evasive, but that properties associated with disease progression *may* be attenuated to some extent. …
Malone, at his substack, considers five new publications:
Top Science News this Week
Below are five articles that stand out as being among the most important regarding Omicron this week.
All five articles suggest that Ominous Omicron is not as ominous as injection cultists would like it to be and is likely akin, symptomatically, to the common cold. I’ll simply quote from Malone’s summaries of two articles, especially with regard to the fifth article, which includes his own views:
This study is important because it is more evidence that 1) symptoms are more mild [i.e., ‘are milder’] and 2) more evidence that Omicron has evolved to infect the upper respiratory system more readily than the lower respiratory tissue (see my earlier substack article on this topic).
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Pre-release of preprint from HKUMed: this paper is currently undergoing peer review
This papers shows that Omicron appears to be associated with three broad characteristics: Vaccine escape (resistance), increased viral replication and reduced disease. In contrast, the preceding dominant variant (Delta) is also associated with vaccine escape, increased viral replication, and increased disease severity compared to preceding dominant circulating variants.
My take: This study presented the data that allowed me to formulate the hypothesis that Omicron may have now evolved to replicate more in our upper respiratory airway, and less in the deep part of our lung tissues due to shifts in receptor specificity. In other diseases, like influenza, replication in upper respiratory airways is associated with less severe disease.