‘Omicron-Like’ Emerges. UK Set For ‘Plan B’ Protocol

Boris Johnson was poised to unveil a new round of COVID restrictions for England as soon as Wednesday. The so-called “Plan B” measures are ostensibly an attempt to arrest the spread of Omicron. “Ostensibly” because there may be an ulterior political motive which smacks of irony.

The plan, FT said, prior to a formal announcement, will include vaccine passports for large venues and a work-from-home order.

Apparently, Johnson wants to distract from an embarrassing leaked video in which staffers lampooned a Downing Street Christmas party in 2020. The gathering, to the extent it took place, would’ve contravened virus containment protocols. Johnson says it never happened. Plainly, it did.

“It looks very much like a dead cat,” a source told FT, which helpfully explained the reference as “a media strategy to distract from bad news,” before noting that “the reports of rule-breaking by the most senior figures in government prompted fears that the imposition of further coronavirus restrictions could be undermined.”

So, in order to deflect bad press tied to a video depicting the government laughing at itself for flagrantly violating its own COVID restrictions in and around Christmas 2020, the same government will implement new restrictions for Christmas 2021, despite the distinct possibility that the public’s knee-jerk reaction to the very controversy Johnson is attempting to bury will be to flout any and all virus restrictions.

FT went on to cite Neil Ferguson, one of the UK’s preeminent COVID experts, who said Wednesday that absent fresh protocols to stop the spread, the new wave would likely crest next month. Omicron cases, he said, are doubling “every three days at least.”

“There is a rationale, just epidemiologically, to try and slow this down, to buy us more time principally to get boosters into people’s arms because we do think people who are boosted will have the best level of protection possible, but also to buy us more time to really better characterize the threat,” Ferguson told BBC Radio 4. “So if you imagine a kind of ‘Plan B’ with working from home, it might slow it down — it wouldn’t stop it but it could slow it down, so rather than doubling every two or three days, it’s every five or six days.”

Meanwhile, Australia discovered a new Omicron sub-lineage. “I want to give a huge thank you to our forensic scientific services,” Queensland’s health minister, Yvette D’Ath, said. “It’s their work that has led to the… reclassifying of Omicron into two lineages and we have both of them here in Queensland.”

Apparently, fewer gene variations means the new lineage is more difficult to detect. “It’s mainly… an issue about the technicalities on how they’re picked up,” a microbiologist at the Australian National University quoted by The Guardian explained.

Peter Aitken, a Queensland health official, said that other than being able to confidently “classify it as Omicron, we don’t know enough about it to [know] what that means as far as clinical severity [and] vaccine effectiveness.” “We now have Omicron and Omicron-like,” he remarked.

Once again, Mother Nature is demonstrating her legendary penchant for creativity.

Later Wednesday, Pfizer said three doses of its vaccine “neutralized” Omicron in preliminary lab tests.