Biden chief of staff Ron Klain shares segment comparing Omicron to flu

White House chief of staff Ron Klain shared a TV segment from MSNBC host Chris Hayes comparing the pandemic experience for vaccinated and boosted Americans as akin to the flu.

Klain retweeted the segment Wednesday night, shortly after Hayes gave a monologue that drew both on early data about the severity of illness linked to the Omicron variant – as well as his assessment of 'fatigue' setting in among the pandemic-weary public.

Hayes began noting that more than 200 million Americans, nearly 66% of the eligible population, were vaccinated.

'That has transformed the risk level and experience of the pandemic for the vast majority of those people,' he said. 'And of course, there are still people, many people, millions who are immunocompromised or who are otherwise vulnerable due to age or medical conditions.'

Then he returned to his speech about the evidently less severe omicron variant – which appears to be substantially more contagous than the Delta variant.

'But for the people who don't fall into that category – we're talking about 150 million people maybe or more. Those people who are vaccinated particularly those who are boosted, you know, the risk, the personal risk of being exposed to this went from something that we hadn't really dealt with specifically like this before in our lifetimes – We haven't quite had an illness, this infectious, and it's possible to cause serious illness – to something that does look more like the flu,' he said.

'And the flu, of course, can still be dangerous – kills tens of 1000s of Americans every year, but we don't orient our lives around the flu. So that's closer to the level of risk that you know, 200 million Americans are less than that are now dealing with,' Hayes continued.

'And then when you add in the sheer exhaustion many people feel – and I don't have to tell you this I'm sure because you're just feeling this yourself, many of you with the length of this disruption their lives – obviously the politics of the pandemic are just completely different than they were earlier in the pandemic.

Klain served as Barack Obama's Ebola virus advisor in 2014, and is a longtime aide to Biden.

His tweets have sometimes caused blowback for the White House, as when he retweeted former Obama economic advisor Jason Furman calling supply chain inflation issues a 'high class problem' in October.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at the time his Twitter habits were 'not a top priority' and that he speaks 'on his own accord.'

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly compared the coronavirus to the flu when the virus first hit, at a time when there were not yet vaccines and it and many medical treatments were not yet online.