Actual doctor Ken Jeong has some choice words for Omicron skeptics
"Don't be an asshole" is about as succinct as medical advice gets
TV News Ken Jeong
It’s been a long, strange, occasionally nude trip for former practicing physician Ken Jeong. Sharing one anecdote about his long-ago New Orleans residency, the TV, movie, stand-up, and game show star, explained to Jimmy Kimmel that, yes, it is literally possible to “fuck someone’s brains out.” (The actual term is transient global amnesia, and, thankfully, the gentleman in question returned to normal once the afterglow wore off.)
But it’s not all masked singers and making fun of former Community costar and occasional I Can See Your Voice guest judge Joel McHale for the actual expert in internal medicine. Kimmel, as you do these days, took Wednesday’s opportunity to pepper a doctor acquaintance with questions about the latest, potentially disastrous COVID mutation, the appropriately menacingly named Omicron variant. And, well, Jeong had some thoughts.
“We just gotta play common sense, be kind to each other, and not be an asshole,” stated Jeong, which is the sort of blunt talk from a qualified medical professional a lot of people really seem to need at this point in our long international nightmare. And, hey, if American COVID deniers, especially, are so quick to take the word of marginal celebrities concerning a worldwide pandemic, here’s a guy who not only is a doctor, but who played one on TV. Couldn’t hurt.
As to another TV doctor who’s been shooting his mouth off lately, Jeong was equally unsparing in mocking fellow physician Dr. Mehmet Oz (or just Dr. Oz, to those who swear by the Oprah-enabled peddler of sketchy diet claims), who is apparently running for a Pennsylvania Republican Senate seat. “If he enters the Senate race, that means I can start my MMA career,” stated Jeong, citing the similarly nonexistent qualifications of both himself and Oz in those areas. And, while Jeong was honest about his chances in the “skinny-fat flyweight” division inside the octagon, he, at least, hasn’t been advising people to take hydroxychloroquine instead of the free, effective, and readily available COVID vaccine, or suggesting (to Fox News misinformation merchant Sean Hannity) that it’s worth losing two or three percent of the nation’s public school students to COVID for the sake of the economy.
Getting into the actual science (as opposed to Oz’s go-to psychics, homeopaths, faith healers, and anti-vaxxer guests), Jeong told Kimmel all about all the spike proteins, mutations, and other factor which could make Omicron this year’s real holiday ruiner. “There’s worries that it could be more transmissible,” stated Jeong, “We don’t know if it’s going to be more virulent or more dangerous.” Adding a riposte to those stubborn skeptics out there claiming that those pesky infectious disease experts are being over-cautious concerning this newest threat to global health, Jeong offered up a sincere, “You’re welcome.”
Ken Jeong, in addition to his judging duties on The Masked Singer, hosts the singing competition, I Can See Your Voice, whose holiday special airs on December 14 on Fox.
63 Comments
How and why the hell does he work with Jenny McCarthy in the first place?
Yeah it’s a little rich of him to be talking about this while palling around with the ORIGINAL anti-vaxxer.McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy Jr basically invented the “dumbass celebrtiy weighs in on medical issues they don’t understand, gets their dumbass fans killed” genre.
Yeah but she’s REALLY hot.
Yeah, it’s gotta be a little weird for him to work with the first celebrity anti-vaxxer. She really brought the anti-vax movement mainstream.
Wait, he’s supposed to quit his job because his coworker has shitty opinions? How are we doing coworker math?What if there’s an immunocompromised key grip, and an executive producer heavily invested in Moderna. Does that balance out the anti-vax math?
OK, let’s go with Kimmel asking the obvious question. “So have you and Jenny McCarthy discussed this?”
Thank you for thinking through what others evidently haven’t.
I’m as pro-vax and anti-anti-vaxxers as they come but you wouldn’t have to pay me much to sit next to Jenny McCarthy and be on TV
A paycheck is a paycheck?
Showbiz. Money. You’re probably working with bigots too. We all do.
Does everyone at your place of work think the same as you?
Can’t speak for Left, but they probably do, at least on certain key issues. “Nazis are bad”; “genitals are not for the workplace”; “get vaccinated”; “no fish in the microwave”; “sex should be between adults”; “don’t leave the gas on”. And so on. And if they’re not, they probably keep quiet about it. I don’t know if the threshold is one coworker with one unacceptable opinion, but there’s certainly a point where, if the people around you don’t agree on this sort of basic principle, you should probably look for work elsewhere. And I think that if your coworker isn’t just a follower of an evil belief, but a leader in actively spreading it, that probably would further swing the needle toward finding an alternative job. Would I want to work next to Jenni McCarthy, or the leader of an openly neonazi militia, or a leading campaigner for the legalisation of paedophilia? Probably not.
I live in Oklahoma. I live in rural Oklahoma. There are two reasons I can’t do what you say. 1) Finding a job in a rural area is very difficult, especially finding one that I like as much as I like my current job. 2) There is no way I’m finding a job anywhere in Oklahoma that doesn’t have a high percentage of people who agree with me on the things I find most important. I’m going to be working with a significant number of people who are homophobic (even though there will also be LGBTQ+ coworkers,) anti-choice, anti-vax in some form, racist, etc. Anyone who talks about moving to another state or changing jobs as if it’s a simple thing to do and doesn’t have major consequences is very privileged.
So far as I’m aware, you are not Ken Jeong. So far as I’m aware, Ken Jeong IS very privileged. So far as I’m aware, he does not live in Oklahoma. Things that may be true of his life may not be true of yours; things that he may be obligated to do are not necessarily also obligatory for you. Your circumstances differ from his.
You replied to a person who asked if everyone at your place of work agreed with you with a screed that was written using a general you, rather than specifying Ken Jeong, and therefore implying that everyone should live by the standard of only working somewhere that at least the majority of coworkers agree with them. So, even though I was using my circumstances as an example of how it is for a lot of people, I did so because you did imply that that was obligatory for me as I am part of the everyone included in your general you. If you want what you say to only apply to a specific person, then you should use specific language.
I don’t recognize this guy. He’s a little… extra
He’s very extra!
OCVID vaccine.
IT’S THE ULTIMATE FINAL FORM OF THE CORNOVIRUS!!!
La Coronita Mas Fina
OCVID
Please don’t call it that.
:gentle clap:
Everyone’s laughing, and riding, and Cornovirusing except Buster!
I think news media is going a little overboard on Omicron, but on the other hand, I don’t think they played up Delta enough until it was almost impossible to find a hospital bed in some states.Anyway, Dr. Ken’s right — don’t be an asshole about this, people. The frustrating thing is the next 2 weeks or so until we get reliable data on how effective the current shots are. Early news from Israel, where a shit-ton of the population got the Pfizer vaccine, looks promising, though.
At some point, selection pressure would ideally drive the virus to mutate into a more transmissible but less lethal variant, at which point it simply become one of the many, many endemic viruses we have to cope with. But it’s certainly taking its sweet time.
Without a Tamiflu type antiviral, it’s still a precarious position. Both Merck and Pfizer have them in the end stages though, which is good. That said, get vaxxed and then get boosted.
Two years isn’t really that long for that inevitable mutation. I think that was the rough amount of time it took for the 1918 flu to mutate from “killing millions” to “pfft it’s just the flu”.
Omicron is a pretty bad stomach bug
And 650 years is the time it took for Bubonic Plague to go from “has a very good chance to kill you unless treated” to “oh, wait, it’s still that virulent.”A decline in virulence is a possible outcome, but it hasn’t been considered inevitable since the 70s or 80s.“There is little or no direct evidence that virulence decreases over time. While newly emerged pathogens, such as HIV and Mers, are often highly virulent, the converse is not true. There are plenty of ancient diseases, such as tuberculosis and gonorrhoea, that are probably just as virulent today as they ever were.A change in conditions can also drive the trend in the other direction. Dengue fever has afflicted humans since at least the 18th century, but an increasingly large and mobile human population is thought to have driven a marked increase in virulence over the last 50 years or so. Even the seminal case of the rabbit-killing myxoma virus is uncertain. There was little subsequent decline in virulence after Fenner’s early reports, and it may even have risen slightly.”https://theconversation.com/will-coronavirus-really-evolve-to-become-less-deadly-153817
Bubonic plague also isn’t a virus. Tuberculosis also isn’t a virus. Gonorrhoea? Also not a virus.Bacteria and viruses are fundamentally different in how they reproduce, how they mutate, and what they require to survive.
They also mention Dengue, which is a virus, but it’s spread by mosquitoes. While anything is possible, the fact that we are constantly surrounded by respiratory viruses but aren’t constantly coping with catastrophic pandemics suggests that the virulence of respiratory viruses isn’t sustained indefinitely.
As you say, it really all depends on the adaptive landscape. If we make it harder and harder for the virus to find a new host, that helps create selection for less virulent strains. That also means it possible to create the selective conditions for a more virulent strain. On hypothesis is that the virulence of the 1918 strain was selected for because crowded field hospitals made transmission very easy.
A key difference with dengue and plague is that they don’t rely on human-to-human transmission; killing its human victims isn’t a big problem, because it’s not directly relying on those humans to maintain the spread of the disease. A disease like covid, where it’s not expected that continual reexposure from animal reservoirs is going to be a problem (at least in the short term) has more incentive to keep hosts alive longer.[Tuberculosis is very different; it relies on extremely long periods of infectiousness. 90% of infections are latent, and even many active infections are asymptomatic. When it does get serious, it can be deadly, but it takes years to kill. The death of the human is less of a problem when it occurs after such a long window for onward infection]Bubonic plague is a slightly sophistical choice of example, by the way. Bubonic plague IS the more transmissable, less virulent evolution! The earliest plague was pneumonic (spread through the air, between humans), and it has over time become more and more biased toward the bubonic form (spread by fleas, from rodent reservoirs), which is less deadly but much more transmissable.
Don’t quote me on this because I can’t recall the exact source off-hand, but I read that if you dig down into the actual data we have on Omicron so far, you find that might actually be the case. It seems to be an extremely mild variant but very transmissible. Unfortunately, there are a handful of individuals fearmongering for attention and as usual the media is jumping on it like Shaggy and Scooby on sandwiches.
The problem is that the sample size for Omicron is just too small to make any reliable assumptions yet, all they can do generalize the observations thus far. Ironically, it would be best to treat this “conservatvely”, i.e. taking an abundance of caution, but the “conservatives” in America (and, sadly, elsewhere) have been anything but conservative when it comes to the pandemic.
People have really latched on to that one doctor in South Africa saying that in her experience most cases of omicron are mild. But of course, MOST cases of MOST covid variants are mild; it will be a while yet before we really know how deadly omicron is, because that’s something you need actual statistics to show, not personal anecdote. In addition, south african doctors have experience of Beta, which was deadlier than the variants we’ve had in the West, so the baseline comparison for omicron is going to be rosier for them. There’s also the fact that far, far more south africans appear to have already been infected (over 50% according to some studies), so many of these omicron cases will be reinfections. And it’s also not clear to what extent the mortality rate varies between races anyway.
The only reporting I’ve heard has been along the lines of “There’s a new variant, we know it’s more transmissible than Delta, but it’s too early to say whether it’s more deadly or vaccine resistant.” I wouldn’t call that fear mongering, exactly.
Some doctors from SA have been suggesting it’s less lethal. The classic “dry cough” isn’t high in the list of symptoms, even. Loss of taste dropped off as well. It seems fever and headache are the biggest symptoms for this one. And hospitalizations haven’t spiked from it, so it seems like it very well could be less deadly, even if more transmissible.
At some point, selection pressure would ideally drive the virus to mutate into a more transmissible but less lethal variant,In traditional viruses sure, because it’s not evolutionary advantageous to kill the host before they can spread the virus.The catch with COVID is you’re shedding the virus before you become symptomatic, let alone die. So the two are unrelated. The virus can become less or more deadly but so long as it’s infectious for long enough prior.
I suspect that going hard on omicron is a direct result of the disaster that was delta – that one hit very hard. That said, from what I’ve read that omicron, while highly transmissible, also tends to result in mild symptoms. Of course, still early so don’t know how true that is, but that is generally what viruses settle into – transmissible enough that they spread everywhere constantly, but mild enough that people still leave the house to keep transmitting it.
It also seems hard to rule out that people are panicking more about Omicron for very straightforwardly racist reasons.
Personally, being vaguely connected to the health care industry, I think overcaution with omicron can be a good thing. We’re already straining the limits of our urgent care and hospital system with COVID issues, and until we can get more information about omicron I’d rather deal with temporary quarantines and distancing requirements than add hundreds of thousands more patients to an overflowing queue.It will forever be a source of dark irony for me that political conservatives are being the least conservative about epidemiology and virology at this point in our national history.
Present-day American political conservatives are anything but.
Agreed that Omicron, at least so far, seems to be more transmissible but less lethal.What we definitely know is that being vaccinated drops the possibility of dying from a Covid-19 infection to close to zero, while we still have unvaccinated people dying on a regular basis. If we got everyone (EVERYONE!) vaccinated, Covid-19 would simply become just another annual bug like influenza. BTW, getting the flu shot is just as important—flu still kills over a half million people a year.Dr. Ken’s advice is spot on. It should be the new CDC slogan:“Don’t Be an Asshole. Get Your Shots.”
That’s the one bit of good news from all this in Australia. We went from several hundred deaths a year from influenza to none since June 2020 because of Covid-19 precautions.
I haven’t seen the numbers, but I think there was a similar effect in the U.S.—all the isolation, mask wearing, and hand washing cut transmission of just about everything.
…Among people who were willing (as in, not being an idiot) & able (as in, not forced out of isolation or mask-wearing by idiots) to cooperate.
This is just anecdotal, but I usually get at least 2 colds per year; I just seem very susceptible to them. 2020, in the midst of hand-washing and mask-wearing supremacy? Not a single one.Mind you, that was the year I was diagnosed with cancer, so swings and roundabouts.
Probably so? I mean, we already gotten Delta variant which is more transmissible than earlier variant (while thankfully causing same level of symptoms). It appears that Omicron variant is the same, just way more transmissible than Delta, yet still not deadlier.My prolonged concern is that the longer we go through with this pandemic (and likely turning into endemic), we might see new variant that cause more dangerous symptoms. We haven’t reached that point and I hope we ever won’t.I am okay with the news focusing on Omicron because I rather be aware and alert about it (and keep pounding this over the heads of anyone who STILL ARE NOT VACCINATED!)
So what if they are going overboard with Omicron? Mild COVID symptoms are still pretty awful, even without taking long-term effects into consideration.
We want to put an end to the pandemic. If we’re “too cautious” with this one, that could mean no more mutations/variants. If we’re not cautious enough, we could see more of them that either keep us ass-deep in the spread or find variants that are more transmissible and more virulent and far deadlier.
I don’t want Omicron, and it’s here in Minneapolis where I now live. I don’t want any of the variants, past or future. I want to move forward into a post-COVID world.
that’s cool that he did his residency in N.O…I went to grad school at a med school in N.O. and learned one strange thing and gained one great anecdote…(1) during Desert Storm the military allegedly selectively chose medical reservists from N.O. because they had more experience with horrific gunshot wounds and strange microbes than anyone else; and (2) one time in class our prof was showing us pictures of strange rashes that we had to identify…we identified them all until we got to a dude with a strange rash around his groin that was clearly demarcated where you’d wear underwear…we threw out ideas and got everyone shot down until the prof blithely told us “this gentleman had an allergy to leather” and then moved on like nothing happened. I’ll never forget looking around the room in disbelief, so many jaws on the floor.
“Be kind to each other, don’t be an asshole”What if I told you antivaxxers/maskers, and other irredeemable selfish pricks spreading COVID misinformation take pride in being the biggest assholes around?
Yeah, I don’t know why folks still get this after the past 5+ years, but lib triggering is the entire point of…all of this.
Correct. Cruelty is a the point. “Triggering” is what they call when reasonable people understandably react to it.
We just have to convince them that getting vaccinated and not dying from COVID is the ultimate way to own the Libs.
Avoid them as best you can. Some people just aren’t worth your time/life/health/sanity/etc.
God Dr. Oz sucks.
The media, and everyone in my town, has been going apeshit over this. People going back to wearing masks in cars, or outdoors when there’s no one around. Covid is like an abusive boyfriend that keeps threatening to leave but secretly we want him to stick around.
Omicron is kind of a cool name.But yeah, don’t be an asshole.
I think they’re trying to scare people into getting vaccinated. Delta didn’t sound very threatening.Once we get to Omega, shit’s gonna get real.
Just for accuracy’s sake, the quote was not 2-3% of students, it was 2-3% of covid deaths. Which is a much smaller number. Statistically, children don’t die of covid. The ones that do die are extremely rare and have serious co-morbidities. The argument is that some very small percentage of children will have a bad reaction to covid and some very small percentage of children will have a bad reaction to the vaccine. Nobody really knows the accurate percentages but both sides claim the difference is huge in their favor. When we are talking about percentages much less than 1%, it’s hard to get good data especially if nobody is really looking (because their agenda is already set).I believe most people should get the vaccine but I also understand the strong bias from authorities who simply do not have any reliable treatments other than the vaccines. There is no room for maybe in the official playbook.
Meanwhile – my Governor: He’s not happy that someone found out that masks work and that Parson squashed it. Can’t go against the Trumplican party line that Covid is just a rumor. They are also trying to remove the ability for health departments to issue emergency health orders. Because of course they are.
I think using Greek letters for these things is played out. We should use something new, like maybe Egyptian Hieroglyphs.“News today that the first cases of the Pointy Bird Looking Straight At You Variant have been found in America.”