Covid Inc. has done a disastrous job launching its latest product

From: CEO, Covid Inc.

To: All employees, Covid, Inc.

(Originally published Dec. 6 in “What in the World“) Greetings to all my fellow coronaviruses this festive Season! I wanted to take a moment to thank you all for the hard work you’ve been doing for the past two years to infect the human race and make Covid-19 the world’s No. 1 pathogen. Keep it up!

I also wanted to say a word about the launch of our latest product, the Omicron variant. Omicron is a fine product and we continue to have high hopes for it going into the rush for Christmas shopping, travel and celebrations. Our engineers worked tirelessly to produce its 40-odd mutations in record time, and we’re confident it will eventually be the virus to beat. Signs are already emerging that it’s well on its way. In just two weeks, Omicron has already been rolled out in 47 countries, and is now available in 17 of the United States. So to all of you in our Omicron division, good going! Your success is building on the remarkable work done this year by Team Delta.

But, I can’t deny that the launch of Omicron has been something of a disappointment—and for that I have to accept my share of the blame.

With 20/20 hindsight, it now seems obvious that announcing Omicron in time for Black Friday was a serious miscalculation. While all our studies indicated that having a new strain ready for the year’s biggest shopping day would accelerate its acceptance, that now appears to have been a premature conclusion.

What did we overlook? That unveiling a new strain on one of the biggest holidays in one of the world’s most important media markets would create a vacuum of information that would stretch from Thursday on Thanskgiving, through the following Monday.

That gave fear a jump on Omicron that we hadn’t anticipated. Given the pace with which the market was already unwinding measures against gathering, travel, mask-wearing and social distancing, our marketing team believed Omicron’s market entry would go much more quickly and smoothly. On the contrary, the fear has triggered a regulatory wave of new travel restrictions, mask mandates and vaccination advisories (and even calls for booster shots) have largely preceded Omicron’s rollout. There are even anecdotal reports that many people who refused to get vaccinated during Delta’s rising popularity are now changing their minds. While it’s not immediately evident in overall infections, this is slowing new sales, and setting back our winter infection targets across all product lines.

Clearly, this is not what we intended. But without the benefits of testimonials and other studies from new Omicron users, the market has filled the void with speculation, most of it unflattering and sensationalized.

Some have taken advantage of our test bed for Omicron, South Africa, to spin unfounded theories. Some, for example, have hypothesized that Omicron might not be as deadly as Delta because people in whom it was deteced weren’t all that ill, even though most of those early adopters were young and so unlikely to get ill anyway. Some have speculated that Omicron might have emerged in South Africa because HIV prevalence there is so high that immunocompromised people keep Covid in their bodies longer than others. Still others have conjectured that South Africa’s high HIV prevalance might mean Omicron isn’t all that dangerous because it’s mainly infecting immunocompromised people (nonsense!), which is also why it appears to be infecting people who already recovered from earlier versions of our product.

Our messaging simply wasn’t able to get out there to its intended audience. It’s very clear to most that Omicron is very infectious, potentially moreso than Delta. Kudos to our engineers on that one. And Omicron may indeed prove to be the kindler, gentler coronavirus, one that can infect humans over and over again, year-in and year-out, without the less desirable after-effects (and tragic deaths) that have accompanied earlier versions in a small sub-segment of users, most with prior health conditions.

Now let me say something as well about the name. As you all know, we still work at a disadvantage in that the World Health Organization still has naming rights. We were aiming for the new strain to win the designation “Nu,” so it would sound to people just like what it is, new and improved. We weren’t aware that sounding like an English word was something the WHO would actually avoid. So it skipped Nu and Xi, the latter of which was deemed too similar to the pronoun “she” and therefore gender-biased (we dodged a marketing bullet there), and also too similar-sounding to the surname of the president of China (our original and biggest potential market). We ended up instead with the austere-sounding Omicron, which is beyond the ability of many people’s memory or pronounciation. Better luck next strain. (Note: the next strain should by rights be called “pi,” which would be a marketing coup, but we expect the WHO will skip it and “rho” straight to ominous-sounding “sigma.”)

So, where do we stand? Omicron is being adopted with amazing speed and success. It’s quickly catching on in a larger number of nations and regions far from South Africa, including England and Denmark, and in almost a third of U.S. states. But, that’s sparking a proliferation of new and tighter travel regulations. In our favor, more and more consumers are marking their frustration to these restrictions with protests like we saw in Vienna and Brussels, which over the weekend turned violent.

Fear about Omicron is fueling a feverish drive to convince more people to get vaccinated or, if vaccinated, to get booster shots, including new calls from outgoing German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Now, Omicron was designed with mutations that we think will prevent vaccines from working against it. But this vaccine drive threatens to set back all the progress we’ve been making with Delta, particularly in central Europe and the Lowlands.

An early study of suspected Omicron patients in South Africa suggests that it may not be as severe as Delta. But the study only has a sample size of 166 patients over the past two weeks. Less well-publicized, however, is the fact that Omicron hasn’t yet led to as rapid a rise in hospitalizations or deaths as Delta. In South Africa, for example, Omicron is the fastest-growing coronavirus by far, but the death rate hasn’t budged.

So, we’re disappointed by how we handled Omicron’s launch and by the regulatory and consumer backlash. But we remain confident that it will not only become one of our most successful strains yet, but that vaccinations won’t progress fast enough for it to cannibalize all the fantastic gains we’re making with Delta. After all, while there’s evidence that infection with earlier strains doesn’t prevent infection by Omicron, no one has yet determined that infection with Omicron doesn’t prevent infection by much deadlier Delta.

We’ll be reviewing our marketing plans for Omicron and our next strain and hope to do better. You all have done an outstanding job, notwithstanding these setbacks. Wherever you are and whoever you’ve infected, I want you to know you can be proud of what you’re doing for the company.

Oh, for those of you circulating in aerosol form, there are donuts and gluten-free bagels in the terminal.