Welcome to meet the press daily, im chuck todd. Here we are, anxiously awaiting the science on omicron. Public concern waits for nobody and right now uncertainty is dominating the headlines. What the white house says and does to fill this vacuum of information is going to be critical in the next couple of weeks. They use this as an opportunity to reset their messaging on the pandemic, specifically vaccine mandates, or not. The white houses Covid Task Force is holding its briefing on omicron right as we speak. They are echoing President Bidens comments that the variant is a cause for concern, but not panic. It comes as the cdc has clarified and strengthened its recommendations for covid booster shots, basically saying unambiguously all adults should get boosted when they are at least six months removed from their last vaccine dose. So heres cdc director Rochelle Walensky just a few minutes ago. For the 45 million unvaccinated adults, now is the time to get vaccinated. We also know that
So i think with all of this we re going to be learning so much more over the next week and a half in terms of transmissability, in terms of severity of illness and vaccine protection, so right now there s a lot of speculation going on. so the speculation that i m speaking with you about is maybe about as valid as anybody else s is but we ll see how it plays out. but i don t see i don t see the apocalypse coming. i think we re going i think we re going to be okay as a nation if we can get everybody vaccinated and this gets to the final point. you know, what we do, whether there s omicron or delta really doesn t change what everybody needs to do, which is to get your third immunization if you haven t, because you need to do that. if you re infected and recovered, you still need to get vaccinated to both protect yourself against reinfection either from delta or omicron and get your kids vaccinated and that s the bottom line. that s why we re failing as a country because we ve only don
Facebook and twitter. my friend and colleague, chuck todd, and mtp daily starts right now. if it s tuesday, the white house s top public health officials brief the public amidst the growing anxiety over the omicron variant. is the u.s. doing enough to combat vaccine miss information? plus the latest on the legal battle in the house s probe of the january 6 insurrection as trump s former chief of staff and a former member of congress, mark meadows, begins cooperating with the investigation. and finally it s giving tuesday. we ll talk to the ceo of feeding america about what food banks need this holiday season as food banks battle inflation and supply chain issues.
Invested in the genotyping and we re one of the top states in terms of the percentage of samples that are geno typed. so there s a lot of work happening with partners on the ground and that includes surveillance efforts related to omicron, so i think there s a lot there. but i will say your broader question is a good one. look, south africa, botswana, these countries, these global colleagues did a service to humankind by finding this variant, right? absolutely. and yet we have to be asking the question if that were in the united states, how quickly would we have found it? the answer is that it s a patchwork across the country. that is something we need to see more of is more investment in these genotyping and geno surveillance systems and think about vaccine diplomacy. really the very countries who come forth with information, we
College of medicine as i m sure moderna and pfizer is. you take serum from an experimental animal or serum from patients who have been vaccinated and you first confirm that it s neutralizing the original variant, which you d expect, and then you look at the decline in virus neutralizing antibodies against the omicron variant as well as some of the others. undoubtedly the moderna ceo is right, there will be a decline. i still have optimism that it may hold up sufficiently to cause significant protection, but it s all moot. we ll know this in a week or so and those are going to be important studies. i was just going to say this is a knowable answer before the end of next week? possibly. and again, this is not the same as looking at actual vaccine effectiveness studies in the field. it s still a laboratory-based observation. but it gives us a trend and a hint of what we re dealing with.