Thread by @danielgoyal

1/ The “Omicron is mild narrative” is simply untrue and hugely harmful!

Scientists, doctors, experts and everyone else need to take responsibility for the harm done when minimising Covid - death and disability.

Thread 🧵

2/ There is no doubt that in the absence of boosters Omicron is a brutal infection for a significant number of people.

Still, for the majority it will pass without the need for medical care and recovery will be relatively uneventful. But some will have life-changing illness….

3/ There is no way of predicting who will get severe disease. The myth that Covid only affects older adults has been debunked in 2020.

All adults have the same increase in risk of death from Covid (figure).

But vaccines and access to healthcare change that risk.

[BMJ]

4/ Vaccines and access to healthcare make substantial reductions in deaths and disability…

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1488572867545546766

Even with good booster cover Omicron can cause severe disease, death, disability, and can buckle a nation’s health service.

A good example is the U.K. where booster coverage reached 50%, yet a surge of Omicron admissions led to many patients dying due to delays in accessing care

6/ But good vaccine cover is a complete game changer. Individual risk with Covid falls dramatically and the impact on other health conditions also falls dramatically.

7/ Without vaccine cover and we are back to March 2020. Fail to boost the population and we are back in high risk territory.

It is on a knifes edge. And will be until we get pan-coronavirus vaccines and widespread availability of effective treatments.

8/ To talk about “Omicron is mild” or we can get “back to normal” fails to appreciate the fragility of the “decoupling” we have achieved between infection, admissions, death, and disability. People start thinking the disease itself is mild. This is wrong and dangerous!

9/ The US is a prime example where Death is being caused by misinformation.

A deeply polarised nation with a number of prominent politicians, scientists, physicians and influencers either denying Covid or trying to minimise it. Yet, the death toll is staggering:

10/ And much of this is due to the failure of getting the public to accept boosters.

Other wealthy nations achieved a surge in booster doses, the Uptake in the US has been very poor.

11/ And the consequence is a consistently higher death rate. More Americans are dying than in other wealthy nations.

12/ The U.K. is also now suffering from the “disease is mild” narrative effect on vaccine uptake.

Despite more than half not having had a booster, numbers of vaccines are falling

13/ Not helped by media outlets confidently reporting how mild Omicron was as early as the 1st of Dec, despite having no evidence to support such claims.

14/ And even more reliable sources fell into the “milder” narrative

bbc.co.uk/news/health-59…

15/ The truth was of course very different. Omicron is more severe than the original Covid, the one that had a 30% inpatient fatality rate and ground society to a halt. The difference, it is more infectious.

15/ What a responsible and fact-checked media should have reported is “a new variant has emerged but vaccines seem to provide protection”.

Indeed, “a new, more infectious variant has emerged, but vaccines seem to provide protection”.

But in fairness, the narrative from leadership was similar and several eminent scientists failed to put the less deaths into context.

Leaders should have been honest. “We can’t keep shutting down society, but we will do the best we can”. Instead, “milder” “we will cope” freedom

Some scientists have pushed the narrative further, despite knowing it has been vaccines and treatments that have made the difference not a lucky mutation to SARS2 or “natural evolutionary mildness”.

It creates the illusion of scientific discrepancy…a choice of what to believe

19/ In fact the vast vast majority of scientists are in complete agreement…even the “Omicron is milder” crowd.

▪️Omicron is a serious infectious disease!
▪️without vaccines Omicron would be devastating!

20/ There are a handful of scientists who have went down the rabbit hole of confirmation bias and giddy optimism or conspiracy.

Actual scientists fail when we don’t provide a united front over the basics and succinctly refute such unsubstantiated theories.

21/ Omicron is a serious infectious disease. It kills more than any other infection. Any sense it is “milder” is a slight of hand, achieved through years of research and clinical experience. For it’s true severity to show itself it need only complacency.

The issue of restrictions/protections/mitigations is separate to the key scientific facts. Offering our view on them is one thing, allowing our preference for more or less to interfere with the core narrative that Omicron is serious enough to get vaccinated is an entirely other.

22/ The “it’s mild” and “it’s over” argument is irrelevant at best and simply educated speculation at worst. And the harsh truth is that arguing it is mild and it is over actually costs lives.

People are dying because they believe it is mild. They don’t have to!