WHO: RISK POSED BY OMICRON VARIANT ‘VERY HIGH’
U.S. strengthens its guidance on boosters as concerns grow
As here-we-go-again fear and resignation gripped much of the world, the World Health Organization warned that the risk posed by the heavily mutated Omicron coronavirus variant was “very high.” But operating once again in a vacuum of evidence, governments chose approaches that differed between continents, between neighboring countries, and even between cities within those countries.
Little is known about Omicron beyond its large number of mutations; it will be weeks, at least, before scientists can say with confidence whether it is more contagious — early evidence suggests it is — whether it causes more serious illness, and how it responds to vaccines.
In China, which had been increasingly alone in sealing itself off as it sought to eradicate the virus, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party gloated about democracies that are now following suit as Japan,
South Korea, Australia and other countries gave up flirting with a return to normalcy and slammed their borders shut to the world. The West, it said, had hoarded vaccines at the expense of poorer regions, and was now paying the price for its selfishness.
In the United States, federal officials on Monday called on vaccinated people to get booster shots. President Joe Biden sought to reassure Americans, saying that the new variant is “a cause for concern, not a cause for panic” and that his administration is already working with vaccine manufacturers to modify vaccines, should that prove necessary.
“We’re throwing everything we have at this virus, tracking it from every angle,”
the president said in an appearance at the White House.
Growing concerns about the Omicron variant prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday to say that all American adults “should” get booster doses of the available coronavirus vaccines.
In southern Africa, where scientists first identified Omicron amid a largely unvaccinated population, leaders deplored the travel bans as ruinous and counterproductive to tracking the virus, saying they could discourage transparency about outbreaks. African officials also noted that because of the inequity in distribution of vaccines, the continent faces this latest variant with little to no protection.
But with vaccine deliveries to Africa becoming more reliable, some states looked to a vaccine mandate to curb the spread of the coronavirus. On Sunday,
Ghana’s government announced that government employees, health care workers and staff and students at most schools must be vaccinated by Jan. 22.
Europe, which has acted in unusual concert in barring travel from southern Africa, is speeding up booster shots in the hope that they will work against Omicron, and adjusting or reconsidering a hodgepodge of social-distancing measures, even in restriction-resistant countries such as Britain.
“The lack of a consistent and coherent global approach has resulted in a splintered and disjointed response, breeding misunderstanding, misinformation and mistrust,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization director.
The WHO convened a three-day special session to discuss a treaty that would ensure prompt sharing of data and technology and equitable access to vaccines. The European Union has pushed for the agreement to be legally binding, but the
United States has balked.
The very proposal underlined that two years into a devastating pandemic that has killed millions, devastated national economies and robbed many of the world’s children of nearly two years of formative experiences, there is still no global plan for getting out of it.
As the largely vaccinated West clings to initial reports that Omicron may cause milder illness and may be susceptible to vaccines, entire swaths of Africa remain essentially unvaccinated. Some nations, like South Africa, have sufficient doses but have struggled to distribute them. Others lack the freezers, logistical infrastructure and medical personnel to inoculate their populations.
That has given the virus plenty of time and bodies in which to multiply and mutate.
The travel bans are intended to buy time as scientists determine whether the mutations in the new variant will allow it to dodge existing vaccines. But they also seemed to suggest that core
lessons from the early phase of the pandemic must be learned again: An infection discovered somewhere is likely everywhere — or may be soon enough — and a single case detected means many more undetected.
On Monday, Portugal reported 13 Omicron cases — all tied to a single soccer team — and Scotland reported six, while the numbers in South Africa continued to soar.
Experts warned that the variant will reach every part of the world, if it hasn’t already.
But scientists don’t want to get ahead of the facts: No one knows yet how this variant behaves in real-world situations. If it has a high degree of immune evasiveness, vaccine makers will have to revise their formulas. This would be a major setback in the world’s efforts to emerge from a pandemic soon to enter its third full year.
The other possibility: Omicron could go the way of Alpha, Beta, Lambda, Gamma, Mu and other variants that had worrisome mutations and a period of notoriety
but were driven virtually to extinction by the more transmissible Delta variant.
“We’re in a Delta pandemic now. Does this outcompete Delta? To be determined,” said Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University who has scrutinized the mutations in Omicron. “Delta’s a pretty good virus, right? It’s good in terms of being transmissible. This one would have to show some extraordinary characteristics to outcompete it.”
Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute, said in an email, “The only thing I have somewhat moderate confidence in is that I think this’ll be the most immune evasive variant we have seen to date. Other than that, it’s simply too early to tell — on a scale of 1-10 of how bad this is, it’s either a 3, a 10, or anywhere inbetween.”
Laboratory experiments can help characterize whether mutations are consequential or just a random change of no great significance. But Omicron is so new that it has not yet been sent through a gantlet of laboratory tests.
“It looks grim, but it needs to be tested and we don’t know how these mutations will act together,” said Bette Korber, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Omicron may not have been fully tested in direct competition with Delta. The Delta variant, first identified in India early this year, is at least twice as transmissible as the first version of the coronavirus identified in Wuhan, China, nearly two years ago. By summer, Delta had routed virtually every other variant on the planet.
The origin of omicron is unclear. It came out of a remote part of the virus’s family tree. It is not a descendant of Delta, although it shares some of Delta’s mutations. With testing and genomic surveillance spotty in some regions, scientists aren’t sure how long this variant has been in circulation.