--- title: There's Good Reason to Be Optimistic About Omicron description: Despite the still high toll of COVID-19, there is reason to be optimistic about the Omicron wave because vaccines are proving effective canonical: https://time.com/6146694/covid-19-omicron-optimism/ author: William Hanage article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-02-10T15:19:51.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:18:55.829Z article:section: Ideas og:title: There's Good Reason to Be Optimistic About Omicron og:description: Despite the still high toll of COVID-19, there is reason to be optimistic about the Omicron wave because vaccines are proving effective og:url: https://time.com/6146694/covid-19-omicron-optimism/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt39fbe0c9ba40b8cf/698a22544ee262416f319e29/GettyImages-1238021809.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: A Covid-19 Vaccination Clinic As Massachusetts Omicron Surge Slows Down og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: There's Good Reason to Be Optimistic About Omicron twitter:description: Despite the still high toll of COVID-19, there is reason to be optimistic about the Omicron wave because vaccines are proving effective twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt39fbe0c9ba40b8cf/698a22544ee262416f319e29/GettyImages-1238021809.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # There's Good Reason to Be Optimistic About Omicron > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=c8fac9a1-6127-4859-9f93-c73c70e5a4b3&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine [Watch (HLS stream): The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BTNvQC2o.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2021-12-13. For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts._ by [William Hanage](https://time.com/author/william-hanage/) ## William Hanage Feb 10, 2022 3:19 PM UTC For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts. by [William Hanage](https://time.com/author/william-hanage/) ## William Hanage Feb 10, 2022 3:19 PM UTC Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to notice twinges of a feeling to which I have become unaccustomed. At first I thought it was indigestion, but I’m beginning to think it is actually cautious optimism. That’s because the recent Omicron surge underscored how well our [COVID-19 vaccines](https://time.com/collection/coronavirus-vaccines-updates/) are working. Omicron was first documented in [Botswana and South Africa](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04411-y) in late November, 2021, and rapidly spread around the world. Yet something was different this time around. Compared with the Delta variant, Omicron infection resulted in notably lower hospitalization and death rates in [South Africa](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2822%2900017-4/fulltext) and [elsewhere](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e2.htm?s%5Fcid=mm7106e2%5Fx). There has been a rush to declare [Omicron](https://time.com/6138293/omicron-symptoms-covid-19/) “milder” than Delta, and before we spend any time thinking about whether it is, we should remember that this “mild” virus was responsible for more than 15,000 deaths in the U.S. over the last week alone. And a virus this transmissible does collateral damage by infecting [healthcare workers](https://time.com/6126293/doctors-omicron-worries/) who must then isolate. Having said that, at the peak of Omicron, the U.S. reported about ten times more daily infections than were recorded in the middle of November when Delta was the only variant in town. The Omicron peak however resulted in about twice as many deaths as we saw in the middle of November. It should be clear that were we seeing this many infections with Delta, things would be much, much worse than they are. Three explanations are plausible: First, Omicron causes an inherently less severe disease, the vaccinations are working, or some combination of the two. It is hard to disentangle them because the Omicron wave in South Africa came hard on the heels of the Delta one, and at a point when vaccination had been delivered to a substantial fraction of the population. As a result, the variant emerged into a population with the benefit of more immunity than at any previous stage of the pandemic. Given that Omicron is somewhat able to evade previous immunity, there have been significant numbers of reinfections in people with previous SARS-CoV-2 infections as well as breakthrough cases in vaccinated and boosted people. Closely examining the data from South Africa, [a colleague and I determined](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2119682) that at least some of the apparently mild nature of Omicron is indeed due to immunity keeping people out of the hospital. That is consistent with another [study](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270), which shows the risk of a vaccinated person being admitted to the hospital for Omicron infection is reduced by 70%, compared with an unvaccinated person. Second, side by side comparisons of people infected with each variant in the last few months suggest that Omicron is somewhat less inherently dangerous than Delta. Whether this holds up in older age groups remains to be seen, but again the data are more comforting than might have been feared. Third, people who are vaccinated are also less likely to spread SARS-CoV-2, including the recently isolated BA.2 subvariant of Omicron, which appears [even more infectious](https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.28.22270044) than the original BA.1 Omicron subvariant identified last November. BA.2 is also more able to escape vaccine coverage than BA.1, yet those who are vaccinated were less likely to infect the people living in the same household, according to a [recent study in Denmark](https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.01.28.22270044). Underscoring the importance of vaccination is a comparison of cumulative [death rates](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/01/science/covid-deaths-united-states.html) for the pandemic and the Omicron surge in the U.S. and other high-income countries. Wealthy countries with high vaccination rates are faring substantially better than the U.S., where our vaccination and booster rates are disturbingly low. This stark juxtaposition shows how powerful vaccination can be for keeping our neighbors and loved ones safe. Remember that a vaccination rate of 80% is not “almost as good” as 90%; on the contrary, it is twice as bad because it leaves 20% rather than 10% without the benefit of vaccination. And in a country as large as the U.S. that 10% adds up to about 20 million adults. **_Read More:_**[_How to Clean Indoor Air Properly Against COVID-19_](https://time.com/6143799/covid-19-indoor-air-cleaning/) The success of the vaccines is wonderful news indeed. And yet obtaining a vaccination can still be a difficult feat. Colleagues at Ariadne Labs created a [tool](https://vaccineplanner.org/) that shows on a map how far someone needs to travel to obtain a vaccination. According to their analysis, the U.S. is pockmarked with areas where people who _want_ to be vaccinated must drive 30 minutes or more to a vaccination site. If someone relies on public transportation or is trying to vaccinate a child or teenager, large swaths of the country require at least a 30-minute trip to access vaccinations. For those dealing with multiple jobs, limited physical mobility, childcare, elder care, or other responsibilities, such a journey can too difficult to make. Vaccination must be easily and readily available to _all_. And as we all know, SARS-CoV-2 is an adept and agile adversary. As I write this, the virus is currently infecting more than [2.8 million people](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases) worldwide, and each one of those infections is an opportunity for the virus to mutate into a more—or less— infectious or lethal variant. This vast number of active infections practically guarantees that we will see more SARS-CoV-2 variants. Our best hope is that by immunizing everyone possible, the consequences will not become even more grave. We may not get so lucky with the next variant. ## Transcript [00:00] I think vaccines are misunderstood, and maybe it's because it seems like magic. [00:07] That simplicity and the mystery of it is something that ends up creating a lot of skepticism. [00:14] People are fooled by the speed. [00:17] Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, [00:22] we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. [00:26] If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready. [00:29] Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. [00:34] 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development. [00:40] In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. [00:44] But this was truly a moment of the right fix - [00:47] a brand new kind of vaccine technology - [00:50] at exactly the right time. [00:53] I started out in math, and I moved to biology. [00:56] And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. [01:03] And so the first part of my career was trying to understand [01:06] the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease and trying to make vaccines safer. [01:12] I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. [01:16] I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work [01:20] and discover something that no one else in the world knows on any given day. [01:25] It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. [01:30] I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. [01:35] And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. [01:40] When I first came to Penn from the NIH, [01:44] pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. [01:49] And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. [01:57] Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. [02:01] It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. [02:05] But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. [02:11] Although mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection, it took doctors Karikó and Weissman [02:17] 16 years to figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. [02:22] First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, [02:27] because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. [02:29] So I repeated the experiment and we could see that there was no inflammation in human cells. [02:35] We're both scientists. We're not baseball players who cheer when we hit a homerun. [02:41] We knew that it had great potential. [02:43] But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? [02:47] Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. [02:54] One of the really important problems in coronaviruses that had not been solved is really simple. [03:01] What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? [03:06] And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture [03:13] of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. [03:16] And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. [03:21] At that moment, you realize that you have almost what is a universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. [03:32] A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. [03:40] What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. [03:44] We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly. [03:52] The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months, [03:56] and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. [04:01] "Do it mama!" (laughter) [04:04] Most scientists never get to see a product actually used. [04:09] And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, [04:14] those were special moments. [04:16] I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, [04:22] and they reported that they received the vaccine. [04:26] There were like 200 elderly in that home. [04:30] And nobody died. [04:34] On social media, when children were going back to visiting their grandparents again. [04:40] Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. [04:48] A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. [04:55] These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases. [05:01] Influenza, even cancer. 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