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Dr. Francis Collins, who retired as director of the National Institutes of Health, this past weekend, has some parting words for Americans who are fed up with the coronavirus: The virus is not fed up with you.
As the omicron variant spreads around the world, rattling financial markets and worrying health officials, he told NPR’s Weekend Edition, “I’m worried, and I know people are tired of this, I’m tired of this, but the virus is not tired of us.”
“If anyone listening to this is thinking of throwing caution to the winds because it’s been so long and they’re just so sick of it, there are real consequences there. We do not know what this virus is capable of doing.”
“Nobody was expecting omicron,” he said. “This one really was a curveball. It’s almost like we’re starting over with a different virus from where we began.” While appearing to be milder, this variant is proving more resilient to vaccines.
“All of us were expecting something coming on the heels of delta. But we expected it to be delta plus,” Collins added. “Instead, what we got was omicron, which bears no relationship to any of the previous strains.”
“We’re dealing with a virus that is quite sufficiently different that does really seem to stress the immune system’s ability to respond to it, making this a little tougher than we thought it would be.”
As such, he urged people to get their boosters, and said even if a small fraction of omicron infections are serious, it will still be a big number. “We could be having 1 million cases a day if we’re not really attentive to all these mitigation strategies.”
“‘We’re dealing with a virus that is quite sufficiently different that does really seem to stress the immune system’s ability to respond to it, making this a little tougher than we thought it would be.’”
Two years into the pandemic, COVID-19 has killed 802,969 Americans as of Monday. There is a daily average of 133,012 new cases in the U.S., up 21% over two weeks, according to the New York Times COVID-19 tracker.
Recent research suggests that Pfizer-BioNTech PFE BNTX and Moderna MRNA booster shots appear offer more antibodies and protect against serious illness from omicron than both AstraZeneca AZN and Johnson & Johnson JNJ.
But millions of vaccine holdouts remain. Just over 61% of the U.S. population — or nearly 204 million people — are vaccinated, and only 29.5 % have received a booster shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Collins announced in October that he was stepping down as director of the NIH, having led the research center for 12 years. He has become one of the leading public-health voices during the two-year coronavirus pandemic.
He was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2009. The NIH, a medical-research agency that is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, is based in Bethesda, Md.
Collins, a physician-geneticist noted for his discoveries of disease genes, also served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health from 1993-2008.
“Our healthcare staff are going to get infected with omicron,” Collins told NPR. He said he believed mandating vaccinations for healthcare staff was a good idea. “Even if they end up with mild disease, they can’t very well be working if they’re sick.”
