hotez: absolutely.s is likely because people have not been together, they have been social distancing the last few years and wearing masks. . the flee is way down. now it is in the southern hemisphere. it is coming back with a vengeance over the summer and fall. that sometimes as a predictor of what it will look like in the northern hemisphere. many of us are predicting a severe flu season. the point is when you get your covid bivalent booster, which you should do asap, by the way, ask the pharmacist to get the flu vaccine in the other arm, now is the time to do it. now it flu activity is starting to rise. . where i am in texas, and in the seven united states. the whole country is going to be lit up, in terms of the flu map, as well as covid over the winter. john: dr. peter hotez, thank you very much. dr. hotez: thank you. ♪ judy: there are questions once again about the future of the social media platform twitter and what it should and should not allow online. specifically, how far should the company g

one thing to show you, there's all these numbers and letters, peter hotez calls them the scrabble variantsing to keep in mind they're all part of omicron. that's an important point. the w.h.o. has not said it warrants its own new variant name because they're not different enough yet in order to warrant that. so just to keep that in back of mind as well. they're all variants. >> even if they have a triple letter score like the scrabble thing. >> yes. >> i got my omicron specific booster a few weeks ago, what will the effectiveness be of this new booster perhaps? >> that's the key question. the new booster should be more protective against these new variants for the reasons mentioned. while they're different, they're not different enough to say they're going to evade immunity. if you haven't gotten this booster, you probably should. and also, the antibody treatments are based on antibodies to some of the original strains. if you count on getting an antibody treatment that's probably not as effect against these strains for that reason. but the booster or if you had covid in a time you had ba.