What next?

We owe Omicron to our failure to get “lifesaving vaccines to every corner of the globe,” said Drs. Jay Bhatt and John Brownstein in ABCNews.com. In low-income countries, just 7 percent of people have received one dose, compared with 64 percent in wealthy countries. We were warned that imbalance would allow the virus to spread and increase the chance of dangerous mutations. Now it’s happened. Until vaccines are widely available on every continent, “variants like Omicron will continue to emerge.”

It “will take weeks to tell how dangerous Omicron really is,” said Maggie Fox in CNN.com. Scientists will “look at what’s happening in the real world” by testing patients and looking for Omicron spread. They’ll be watching to see if Omicron inflicts more serious disease and leads to a rising number of breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, vaccine makers will be busy in the lab, taking blood from volunteers who’ve been vaccinated or recently infected and mixing it with Omicron samples “to see how immune cells and proteins work against it.” Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson have all started such testing, and expect results in a couple weeks. If Omicron is found to be resistant to current vaccines, they’ll “be tweaked to target the new strain,” said Holly Ellyatt in CNBC.com. Pfizer said it can create a tailored vaccine within six weeks, “and start shipping batches within 100 days.” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has set a similar timeline.

“We have all the tools to prevail over Omicron,” said molecular medicine professor Eric Topol in TheGuardian .com. We just need to use them. We have masks, ventilation, rapid antigen tests, and vaccines that are “remarkably potent” against hospitalization and death. What’s holding us back is our “unwillingness and resistance to use all these tools”––resistance that’s made the U.S. the world leader in new infections, with more than 90,000 new Delta cases a day. That’s our biggest problem, “not Omicron.”