A ray of hope has glimmered after World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that Omicron does not appear to cause more severe disease than previous Covid variants, and is “highly unlikely” to fully dodge vaccine protection.
In an interview with AFP, World Health Organization’s emergencies director Michael Ryan said while a lot remained to be learned about the new, heavily mutated variant of Covid-19, preliminary data indicated it did not make people sicker than Delta and other strains.
“The preliminary data doesn’t indicate that this is more severe. In fact, if anything, the direction is towards less severity,” Ryan said. “It’s very early days, we have to be very careful how we interpret that signal.”
At the same time, he said there was no sign that Omicron could fully sidestep protections provided by existing Covid vaccines.
“We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalization,” the 56-year-old epidemiologist said.
“There’s no reason to expect that it wouldn’t be so” for Omicron, he said, pointing to early data from South Africa where the variant was first detected that suggest the vaccine at least is holding up in protection terms”.
Ryan acknowledged it was possible that the existing vaccines might prove less effective against Omicron, which counts more than 30 mutations on the spike protein that dots the surface of the coronavirus and allows it to invade cells.
But he said it was “highly unlikely” it would be able to evade vaccine protections altogether.
“We have to confirm if there’s any lapse in that protection, but I would expect to see some protection there. Preliminary data from South Africa wouldn’t indicate that we will have a catastrophic loss of efficacy. In fact, the opposite at the moment. In the fight against all Covid variants, the best weapon we have right now is to get vaccinated,” he said
Two weeks after first being identified, Omicron has been found in dozens of countries around the world.
Early data from South Africa indicates that the new variant is likely more transmissible than previous variants, Ryan said, adding that this was not a surprise.
“When any new variant emerges, it will tend to be more transmissible, because it’s got to compete with previous variants. There is some evidence to suggest that reinfection with Omicron is more common than it was with previous waves or previous variants,” Ryan said.
He said that, as the current Covid vaccines aim to prevent severe disease but do not necessarily protect against simply contracting the virus, reinfections with mild or no symptoms were of lesser concern.
In any case, Ryan said, despite its mutations, the new variant was still Covid and should be fought with the same measures, including vaccines, masks, and physical distancing. The virus hasn’t changed its nature. It may have changed in terms of its efficiency, but it hasn’t changed the game entirely. The rules of the game are still the same,” he said.