Fox News contributor Dr. Marty Makary warned against a new "wave of fear" taking hold over the omicron variant, warning it could fuel a "pandemic of lunacy" in the post COVID-19 era. The professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University joined the "Brian Kilmeade Show" on Thursday to discuss the new variant, explaining it appears to be statistically milder than others.

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DR. MARTY MAKARY: We're seeing this massive new wave of fear that is fueling our second pandemic after COVID-19, which is a pandemic of lunacy, which is omicron. Now I call it omi-cold. If you look at the epidemiological data, the epicenter is now way down from omicron. The hospitals had some hospitalizations, not much. They were short. They averaged two and a half days instead of eight days. But a study just came out of the University of Hong Kong telling us that omicron does not invade the lung tissue that's deep in the respiratory tract. It stays superficial in the nose and bronchus. So that's why we're seeing a common cold-like illness. This new scientific data from the lab explains the epidemiological data and the bedside observation of doctors that this is far more mild… and that's why I call it omi-cold.

It depends what headline you want, what message you want to send, I can recast any respiratory virus as a potential bubonic plague that's going to destroy the United States. It's just how you present the statistics.

We've got to reduce testing in low-risk situations. If you test everyone in the United States, you will find a virus particle in the nose of some fraction of Americans forever. … We can't go hunting for a problem that is a very mild or asymptomatic illness.

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Dr. Makary on 'Kilmeade Show': Omicron fear fueling a 'second pandemic of lunacy'

Makary says omicron looking more like 'omi-cold' based on data so far