Robert Malone on covid: what the evidence says · JRE #1757
“So regardless, the mortality of Omicron is remarkably low. I think we can all agree on that. It's essentially like a cold.”
What the evidence says
Malone claimed Omicron's mortality was "remarkably low" and "essentially like a cold." Peer-reviewed evidence confirms Omicron was substantially less severe per infection than the Delta variant: a large UK national cohort study (The Lancet, 2022) found an adjusted hazard ratio for death of 0.31 for Omicron versus Delta, meaning roughly a two-thirds lower risk of death per case, with a similar reduction (HR 0.41) in hospital admission risk. This risk reduction also varied by age: the hospitalization-risk reduction was smaller in adults 80 and older (HR 0.47) than in 60-69 year-olds (HR 0.25), showing the severity drop was less pronounced in the oldest patients. Separately, CDC surveillance of the U.S. Omicron wave (through mid-January 2022) found that even though the highest 7-day average of daily deaths during that period (1,854) was actually lower than in prior high-transmission periods, the report describes the average daily death count during the Omicron surge as remaining "substantial," alongside record numbers of cases, ED visits, and hospital admissions that strained the health system. Together, these sources support that Omicron caused meaningfully fewer deaths and hospitalizations per infection than Delta, but they do not support equating Omicron's mortality with that of a common cold: the CDC data show a still-substantial, non-trivial daily death toll during the surge, and reduced per-case severity was not uniform across all groups. The claim is best characterized as misleading: it accurately reflects a real, well-documented reduction in per-infection severity relative to Delta, but overstates that reduction into a false equivalence with a common cold's near-zero mortality.
- Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study - PubMed · government
- Trends in Disease Severity and Health Care Utilization During the Early Omicron Variant Period Compared with Previous SARS-CoV-2 High Transmission Periods, United States, December 2020-January 2022 | MMWR · government