A touch of optimism in the face of the concern generated by the Omicron variant.
"We have very effective vaccines that have been shown to be potent against all of the variants so far, in terms of disease severity and hospitalization, and there is no reason to believe that would not be the case. With Omicron, judged Michael Ryan, the person in charge of the emergencies of the WHO in a rare interview with AFP.
"There is no reason to doubt", reassured the doctor.
“The general behavior that we are seeing so far shows no increase in severity.
In fact, some places in southern Africa report milder symptoms, ”even underlined the specialist, like what the eminent American scientist Anthony Fauci had said earlier.
"We have to be very careful"
"We are at the very beginning, we must be very careful in our way of analyzing" these data, however repeated Dr. Ryan, taking care to emphasize that we were at the very beginning of the studies of a detected variant. only November 24.
The appearance of this variant has caused some panic, especially in Europe which is already in the grip of a massive fifth wave of Covid-19 cases caused by the Delta variant.
The Irish epidemiologist - who has fought deadly diseases like Ebola on the ground - said initial information from South Africa "suggests that the vaccine appears to be holding up in terms of protection."
"The preliminary data we have from South Africa does not show that we are losing efficiency to catastrophic proportions," he said, adding: "In fact, it is even the opposite right now. ".
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"The best weapon we have now is to get vaccinated," he repeated, as he and his colleagues have been doing for a year now and the start of vaccination campaigns.
Having been classified almost immediately as "worrying" by the WHO is probably more easily transmitted.
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And you can imagine Omicron overtaking Delta, which has been responsible for the bulk of infections around the world since it was spotted in India in late 2020. But it's possible that Omicron is spreading just as quickly in South Africa because it "exploits a decline in Delta transmission," he said.
