Fauci news live: ‘Moron’ spat senator re-ups disclosure conspiracy as Rand Paul dismisses threats to Dr

Not all those who get infected with Covid-19 will face severe illness, said Dr Anthony Fauci on Wednesday.

At a White House Covid-19 briefing, Dr Fauci clarified the statement made by US Food and Drug Administration Acting Commissioner Dr Janet Woodcock on Tuesday, where she had said that most people will get infected with Covid.

On Wednesday, Dr Fauci said, “What Dr Woodcock was referring to when she said most of us will ultimately get Omicron is not that most of us were ultimately going to get sick with Omicron.”

He added that while Covid can’t be eliminated it can be brought under control.

“If you control it in a way it’s at such a low level, and people are vaccinated and boosted, sooner or later, as we begin to live with it, what she was referring to is that virtually everybody is going to wind up getting exposed and likely get infected — but if you’re vaccinated and if you’re boosted, the chances of your getting sick are very, very low.”

“That’s what she was referring to,” he added.

Dr Anthony Fauci said the US is approaching the “threshold” of living with Covid-19, with cases surging across the country.

The chief medical adviser to the president, while speaking at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Tuesday, said almost everyone will be exposed to the highly-contagious Omicron variant but the vaccinated will fare better.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” he said.

Alisha Rahaman Sarkar reports.

United Airlines is canceling more flights after thousands of the company’s workers called out sick with the coronavirus.

As the US fights to slow the spread of Covid-19’s Omicron variant, reports have surfaced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is considering recommending that those who can should wear a higher standard of mask when in public – specifically the KN95 and N95 masks that have been in high demand for the last two years.

How long should you wear them?

Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday mocked a proposal to allow House members to vote without masks from a plexiglass box in the House gallery, suggesting any member who is concerned about Covid-19 should not be in office.

Speaking to Insider, Ms Greene said she would argue that members “may not be fit to do the job” if they feel threatened by the coronavirus that has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

“Maybe they need to consider that they are the ones in the risk group, and they should just go sit it out until they feel safe to come out,” she said.

Andrew Feinberg reports from Washington, DC.

A New York emergency room doctor has explained which symptoms his Covid patients typically get, depending on which – and how many – vaccine shots they’ve received. Unsurprisingly, the unvaccinated patients fare the worst.

Distrust, misinformation, and delays because of the holidays and bad weather have combined to produce what authorities say are alarmingly low Covid-19 vaccination rates in US children ages 5 to 11.

As of Tuesday, just over 17 per cent were fully vaccinated, more than two months after shots became available to the age group. While Vermont is at 48 per cent, California is just shy of 19 per cent and Mississippi is at only five per cent.

Vaccinations among the elementary school set surged after the shots were introduced in the fall, but the numbers have crept up slowly since then, and omicron’s explosive spread appears to have had little effect.

The low rates are “very disturbing,” said Dr Robert Murphy, executive director for the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s just amazing.”

Parents who hesitate “are taking an enormous risk and continuing to fuel the pandemic,” Dr Murphy said.

Hospitalizations of children under 18 with Covid-19 in the U.S. have climbed to their highest levels on record in the past few weeks. Many have other conditions made worse by Covid-19, though many aren’t sick enough to require intensive care.

The low vaccination rates and rising hospitalisations are “a gut punch, especially when we’ve been working so hard to keep these kids well,” said Dr Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Overland Park, Kansas.

The vaccines have proved highly safe and effective at reducing the risk of severe illness, hospitalisation and death.

Senator Rand Paul has been blasted as “unbalanced” and “delusional” after he doubled down with a new attack on Dr Anthony Fauci following a Senate committee hearing.

Top doctors are warning that most people in the United States are eventually going to get infected with Covid-19 – as the Omicron variant continues to spread rapidly.

A record number of daily Covid-19 infections were reported earlier this week, as the hospitalization rate also spiked massively.

On Monday alone, 132,646 people were admitted due to the virus, a new daily record that was broken again on Tuesday – as per Reuters.

It’s a photo that’s been viewed thousands of times. A two-year-old boy, his eyes closed, lies in a hospital bed with a tangle of tubes protruding from his nose and mouth. One of them is for a ventilator. Underneath it is a Paw Patrol toy.

The boy was Adrian James of Mount Vernon, Illinois, who was critically ill with Covid-19. For parents, the photograph seemed to realise a nightmare that was never supposed to come true – children, supposedly, didn’t get Covid. And yet, here was this seriously ill boy.

Nathan Place reports on what happened next.