only six people with natural immunity caught the variant. why is that? and oxford university study published today found that two dose covid-19 vaccines generate a lower anybody response against the omicron strains, suggesting that the variant could lead to more infections among the fully vaccinated. joining me now is dr. jay bhattacharya, sanford school of attica profession and dr. kirk, pediatric cardiologist. doctor, is this a stunning study or is it too small to really tell us much? no, i don t think it s stunning or too small. this is early in the state of a new variant and we are seeing some interesting data, which is what you would expect. you would expect as there are now 30 mutations of the omicron variant, you would imagine that a vaccine that was prepared against the legacy, predelta coronavirus, that you would expect it to not be as successful. what it would have liked to see
in that u.k. study is that they would have actually tested the serum of those who have been previously infected and see how that did against the omicron variant. laura: yeah, well they didn t do that and they tend not to do that, as we have discussed before, because they don t want to really look at the natural immunity question, but fauci hit the sunday show talk circuit, dr. bhattacharya, to continue to push the vaccine on kids. watch. if you re child is five years of age and older, please get them vaccinated, we need to protect the children. this idea that children are not vulnerable at all is not so, george. the number of cases of children, now well over 2 million children from five to 11 have been infected. over 8,000 to 9,000 hospitalizations and well over 100 deaths. laura: dr. bhattacharya, he just kind of undermined his own argument, did he not, by highlighting how rare it is for children to have severely adverse effects to this virus?
yeah, i mean, children, thank god, have been relatively protected from the severe disease, from this virus, even without a vaccine. you know, there s a difference in the risk of severe disease and death from children to old age. older people being much, much more affected by this infection. he is saying that children can be infected. no one ever doubted that. the issue is do they respond to this infection with a severe outcome, and the answer is they don t. he s fearmongering again to parents for reasons i do not understand. we should be assuring parents that compared to other things like the flu or many, many other risks that children face, covid is not among the most severe that children face, they should be getting back to normal life. laura: i want to play something by this woman named ellen on msnbc tonight, doctor, because apparently now the blame
shifting after a year of a lot of deaths with a vaccine goes back to trump. watch. a monstrous thing that we have to wrestle with is a country is that allowing people to dive covid was a policy choice by donald trump. it is now a policy choice by the republican party, we are now getting into the realm of crimes against humanity. laura: doctor, the man is totally unhinged, crimes against humanity last year? what does this mean? i m not sure what this all means but if i consider a crime against humanity, i would consider that we haven t explored other ways and promoted early treatment of those who are infected. you know, i see hope in our medical creativity in this situation. we ve had almost two years it was almost really a year of vaccines, but for those of us who are going and seeing
patients in their homes and seeing them in our clinics, with the legacy we tried one thing, one from his work and then as delta came, we shifted some, changed doses with success and now with omicron i feel we will do the same thing. if we need to change early treatment we will do that but i think the concern for me is that the only hope that seems to be coming out of the medical community is vaccine. what about early treatment? hoping these people. i go see these people all the time and they were sent home with no treatment. some of the basic things i use our basic asthma meds. laura: we ve talked about this before but it bears repeating, dr. bhattacharya. from the very beginning when we were fighting on this issue back in march of 2020, we were having frontline doxxed tell us is a vitamin d deficiency in most of these patients, zinc deficiency, they were using things from hydroxychloroquine, than ivermectin, steroids, there was a whole range of treatments that were either banned or