The South African physician who informed the world about the new coronavirus variant sounded off this week on the global overreaction towards Omicron.
“Let me be clear: nothing I have seen about this new variant warrants the extreme action the UK government has taken in response to it,” she wrote in The Daily Mail. “No one here in South Africa is known to have been hospitalized with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it.”
And yet, President Biden, for example, implemented a travel ban on eight southern African countries, announced strict new requirements for those entering the country (legally), and continues to push vaccinations and boosters. Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding its surveillance at the four busiest international airports in the U.S. to detect the Omicron variant.
So, what’s the panic over Omicron actually about? According to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Omicron provides Democrats new leverage as we inch closer to the midterm elections.
“As the Democratic Party comes closer to certain defeat a year from now in the midterms, all of this will intensify,” he argued. “That’s the whole point of it. It’s how they won last time and so they’re doing it again. Omicron. Not a single person is in the hospital in South Africa because of Omicron. And yet, that’s the pretext upon which the CDC has just assumed surveillance powers.
“You don’t need to be a genius to connect the dots here,” he continued. “But there aren't a ton of geniuses running the Republican Party, apparently. They still don’t seem to understand what’s happening. Listen to them and they talk like this is about a virus. But somebody needs to push back. Maybe it will take a new party, a civil rights party, to stop our decent towards actual tyranny. But make no mistake, unless someone stops it very soon, it is coming."