Fauci: We Did Not Anticipate Extent of Omicron’s Mutations

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that they did not anticipate the extent of the Omicron variant’s mutations.

Anchor Jake Tapper said, “Vice President Harris told the LA Times this week that the administration did not anticipate the variants. ‘We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists stood on whose advice and protection we relied on didn’t see Delta coming, didn’t see Omicron coming.’ Obviously, nobody can anticipate the specific next variant to come, what the protein will look like, etc., but in a more general sense, did you not see variants coming?”

Fauci said, “We did, Jake. We definitely saw variants coming. I think what was referred to, what was not anticipated, was the extent of the mutations in the amino acid substitutions in omicron, which is really unprecedented. It kind of came out of nowhere, where you have a virus that has 50 mutations, 30 of which are in the spike protein and 10 or 12 of which are in the receptor-binding domain. I mean to me, that’s really quite unprecedented.”

He added, “So that’s something you would not have anticipated, but we certainly were anticipating that there were going to be variants. When you have so many viruses, so much replication going on in the community, if you give a virus enough opportunity to replicate, you know it’s going to ultimately mutate, and sometimes those mutations wind up being a new variant. That’s exactly what happened with Delta, and certainly, that’s what happened with Omicron.”

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