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OPINION
Coronavirus COVID-19

Experts warned a variant like omicron was coming. America still wasn't ready.

Global health experts warned for months that unless we got the whole world vaccinated, variants would emerge that eluded prior immunity.

Marc Siegel
Opinion contributor

David Oshinsky, the top medical historian at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, told me recently that the COVID-19 pandemic would not be remembered because of all the political fighting but in terms of the eruption of biotechnology developed to fight the virus.

If this prophecy is to be proven true, President Joe Biden and his team need to talk not about more lockdowns and closures but in terms of boosters, treatments and testing for the omicron variant.

Omicron so far appears to be far more easily transmissible than the delta variant, although milder, especially if you have prior immunity from a boosted vaccination or probably from a recent infection.

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