joining us now former assistant health secretary add admiral bret giroir. admiral, thanks for being here. great done here, bret. bret: we don t know a lot about the strength of this variant. what can you tell us that you know or have seen so far that we can learn from these early days? so we do have a lot more work to do. but we are concerned but we should not be panicked. we are concerned because there are many mutations in the spike protein that could cause some problems. what kind of problems do we think? well, we know the testing will work. so our testing that we have both antigen and pcr will work against this strain. number two, it s highly unlikely that the vaccines we have especially if boosted will provide protection against omicron as they do against delta. i have concern about monoclonal antibodies. i think they re at risk of working or not working as effectively against this.