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In response to: The WHO and Coronavirus experts are increasingly convinced the new Omicron variant is ‘super mild’ and has, so far, not led to a jump in Covid death rates anywhere in Southern Africa.

The WHO is calling this morning for countries to drop travel restrictions and end the mass hysteria, and instead be cautiously optimistic as more and more reports out of South Africa suggest the new Omicron variant is not more lethal than the previous Delta variant.

In fact, there have been no reports of hospitalisations or deaths as a result of anyone being diagnosed with Omicron.

Most patients merely experience a severe headache, nausea, dizziness and a high pulse rate, according to hospitals and medics across Southern Africa.

However, the news of the new variant, first reported in South Africa, led to mass hysteria around the world: markets thumbed and dozens of countries imposed travel restrictions and additional checks, including the UK, US, EU, Israel, Australia and Japan after the new mutation popped up in the UK, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic and Israel among other countries.

Dr Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, said this reaction was “medically seen, not justified.”

A GP for over three decades, and chair of the South African Medical Association, she was the first African doctor to suggest to local authorities Covid had mutated into a new strain.

Coetzee called the response from many European countries, including the UK, “just a hype.”

South Africa’s health minister Joe Phaahla also said the majority of cases of Omicron seen by doctors in his country have been “mild”.

Asked what he knows about how unwell people are who have it, Dr Phaahla said: “It is still too early at this stage.

He added he has heard from GPs that the “majority of the people they’ve been seeing are mild.”

“Our clinicians have not witnessed severe illness. Part of it may be because the majority of those who are positive are young people,” Dr Paahla added.
Hundreds of infected people across Southern Africa reportedly complain of nausea, headaches, fatigue and a high pulse rate, but none seem to suffer from a loss of taste or smell, which has been the case with most other Covid mutations.

Moreover, more and more medics across Southern Africa are confirming that most Omicron-infected patients merely have a severe headache, nausea or dizziness.

In response to: On 5 May, Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a 10-minute monologue casting doubt on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines on his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight. He announced that almost 4000 people had died after getting COVID-19 vaccines, and added that those data "comes from VAERS,"—the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a U.S. government program that collects reports of side effects possibly caused by vaccines.

It was a misleading statement. The reporting of a death to VAERS indicates nothing about what caused it, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) subsequent investigations have found no indication that deaths were caused by COVID-19 vaccines, save in a small subset with an extremely rare clotting disorder linked to one vaccine. But the TV segment pulled VAERS, a 31-year-old early warning system widely relied on by scientists, even deeper into the culture wars over vaccination. After the broadcast, a new phalanx of antivaccine activists began plumbing VAERS for data to scare the public about vaccination, says Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning nonprofit that is monitoring anti–COVID-19 vaccine activity on social media. "We have been tracking these attacks since February and this one resonated in a different way after Tucker hit it," Carusone says.

It has been distressing to watch for researchers who use VAERS to detect real vaccine side effects—such as the very rare clotting disorder linked to the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine—and to rule out others, thus providing both safety and reassurance to the public. "I can't believe people are using this database now to try to form this antivaccination argument," says Eric Formeister, an ear surgeon at Johns Hopkins University.

Formeister and colleagues turned to VAERS, which is run by CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, after hearing anecdotal reports from patients of sudden hearing loss after COVID-19 vaccination. Their analysis of VAERS data concluded hearing loss was no more frequent, and possibly less frequent, among vaccine recipients than in the population as a whole, as they published in JAMA Otolaryngology last week. CDC is now using VAERS data to probe whether COVID-19 vaccines might rarely be causing heart inflammation in children; it has not yet reached a conclusion.

One of VAERS's strengths—its openness—is also a potential weakness in the politicized COVID-19 era. Anyone who receives a vaccine authorized in the United States can report an adverse event to VAERS, as can doctors, family members, and others. That openness ensures VAERS receives plentiful reports—228,000 for COVID-19 vaccines alone since December 2020, more than four times the number received in all of last year for all vaccines.
Some worry this might make it easy to post false reports. But CDC removes data that are clearly fake, such as a recent report purportedly filed by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro about an adverse event in a beach volleyball superstar. And deliberate, false reporting to VAERS, which is a federal criminal offense, appears to be rare. "We don't have evidence that there is widespread fraud or gaming of the system," says Tom Shimabukuro, deputy director of CDC's Immunization Safety Office, which oversees VAERS. "We have to balance keeping VAERS an open system and getting as much information as we can on vaccine safety against potential data quality problems."

But even honest reports can be used to spook the public. The reports themselves are not vetted, and, as CDC states in a prominent disclaimer, they "may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information."