“There is no reason to doubt” that current vaccines protect patients with the omicron variant from severe forms of COVID-19, Michael Ryan, director of emergencies for the World Health Organization, said Tuesday, in an interview with AFP.
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“We have very effective vaccines that have been shown to be effective against all variants thus far, in terms of disease severity and hospitalization, and there is no reason to believe that this will not be the case. With Omicron, Dr. Ryan explained, in a rare one-on-one interview.
“The general behavior that we are seeing so far does not show an increase in severity. In fact, there are some places in South Africa that are reporting milder symptoms,” the doctor declared, as prominent American scientist Anthony Fauci earlier also told AFP.
“We have to be very careful in our way of analyzing” this data, though said Dr Ryan, taking care to stress on several occasions that we were at the beginning of studies for one of the variants that had only been discovered on November 24 by the South African authorities. It has since been monitored in dozens of countries.
The emergence of this variant has caused some consternation, especially in Europe, which is already in the grip of the massive fifth wave of COVID-19 cases caused by the delta variant.
