President Joe Biden on Monday urged Americans to get vaccinations, including booster shots, to allay concerns about the newly identified COVID-19 variant of the Omicron, but he didn’t stop calling for further restrictions to stop its spread .
In a speech from the White House on Monday, Biden stated that travel restrictions can slow the spread – they can’t prevent it.
“Sooner or later we will see cases of the Omicron variant here in the US,” warned Biden. He called it a cause for concern, “don’t panic”.
“We will fight this variant with scientific and knowledgeable measures and speed, not with chaos and confusion,” said Biden. “We have more resources to control the variant than ever before, from vaccines to booster vaccines to vaccines for children.”
He stressed the importance of getting vaccinated against COVID-19 to protect against all variants, especially since around 80 million Americans ages 5 and up have not received any vaccinations. He also encouraged all Americans to wear masks in crowded rooms. Biden didn’t announce any new virus-related restrictions, aside from measures taken last week to restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries in the region from Monday.
“The best protection – I know you’re tired of hearing me say this – the best protection against this new variant or one of the variants out there … is full vaccination,” Biden said.
Early Monday, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, said that while no cases of variants have been identified in the US, he assumes they are already in the country “and we will have an answer in the near future”. a couple of days.”
On NBC’s TODAY show, Jha said the data from South Africa suggests the variant is spreading rapidly, but cautioned that “we can only guess at portability” at this point and more careful studies are needed to to confirm whether it is due to omicrons or other factors.
“Careful study takes time,” said Jha. “You have to let the virus grow, do the tests, see what happens inside people. It doesn’t get any faster than that.”
When asked whether the Omicron variant can bypass existing COVID-19 vaccines or natural antibodies, Jha said the chances were “extremely unlikely.” The question for scientists, he added, is whether the vaccines are a little less or much less effective at protecting against the variant, and they hope to see this in the next week or two.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and Biden’s lead COVID-19 advisor, also said Monday that “we really don’t know” how dangerous Omicron is compared to previous strains, calling speculation “premature”.
Officials said the move to restrict most travel from the countries where omicron was first identified should give the US time to learn more about the variant. But Fauci said it would eventually reach the US and like the Delta variety could become the dominant strain before that, saying Omicron has “a portability advantage” over other varieties.
The new variant represents the latest test of Biden’s efforts to contain the pandemic, mitigate its impact on the economy, and restore a sense of normalcy to the United States during the Christmas season.
Biden said Monday his government was already working with vaccine manufacturers to “develop contingency plans” in the “hopefully unlikely” event that updated vaccines or boosters to combat the Omicron variant are needed.
“We do not yet believe that additional measures are needed,” said the president.
Pharmaceutical companies are already adjusting their existing COVID-19 vaccines to better target the Omicron variant, but Fauci said Americans should make it a priority to either get their first vaccinations or a booster dose now, rather than moving towards a new formulation wait.
“I would highly recommend that you get a boost now,” he said.
A new variant with the name B.1.1.529 was designated by the World Health Organization as a “worrying variant” and was named “Omicron” after the letter of the Greek alphabet.
He added that, depending on what scientists learn about the Omicron variant in the coming weeks, “we may not need targeted boosters” to contain this strain of the virus.
An omicron specific vaccine might not be ready for two or three months, so getting boosters is now a “very important first line of defense”, said Dr. Paul Burton, chief medical officer of vaccine company Moderna Monday.
Burton said Moderna and other vaccine manufacturers are testing existing COVID-19 vaccines to see how effective they are against the Omicron variant.
Over the weekend, the list of countries that have discovered the new variant among travelers grew. Portugal discovered 13 cases related to the new variant among members of a single football club – only one of which had recently traveled to South Africa.
On Friday, the WHO called it a “worrying variant,” their most serious designation of a COVID-19 variant, and named it “Omicron” as the latest entry in their Greek alphabet classification system, which aims to avoid and increase the stigma of countries of origin simplify understanding.
The UN health agency said it wasn’t clear whether Omicron is more transmissible – easier to spread between people when compared to other variants like the highly transmissible delta variant. It is not clear whether an Omicron infection causes more serious illnesses, although data from South Africa are cited that show rising hospitalization rates there – but that could only be because more people are becoming infected with COVID-19, not specifically Omicron.
So far, the main difference from other variants seems to be that there may be an increased risk of re-infection with Omicron – in other words, people who have already had COVID-19 could be re-infected more easily. There is no indication, but the variant causes a more severe illness.
The coronavirus mutates as it spreads, and many new variants, including those with worrying genetic changes, often simply die out. Scientists monitor COVID-19 sequences for mutations that could make the disease more communicable or deadly, but they can’t tell by simply looking at the virus.
The Omicron variant appears to have a high number of mutations – around 30 – in the coronavirus spike protein that could affect how easily it spreads to people.
To date, Delta is by far the predominant form of COVID-19, making up more than 99% of the sequences submitted to the world’s largest public database.
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