Fauci: Special Omi vax may prove unneeded

Dr. Anthony Fauci said a booster shot specifically for the Omicron variant of COVID-19 may not be necessary for vaccinated people.

The White House chief medical adviser said that the existing shots could be enough to provide protection against the new variant.

“I’m not so sure that we’re going to have to get a variantspecific boost vaccine to get an adequate protection from Omicron,” Fauci told the health Web site STAT in an interview published Friday.

“Because if you look at protection against variants, it appears to relate to the level of immunity and the breadth of the immunity that any given vaccine can instill on you.”

Fauci said manufacturers, as a precaution, were already working on shots that target the variants, but more research is needed to determine how much immunity the current vaccines provide.

“The companies are going to be making variant-specific boosters,” Fauci said. “What I think is something that we need to keep our eye on [is] it could be that things turn out better than we expected.”

First detected in South Africa, the Omicron variant has been labeled a “variant of concern” due to the unprecedented number of mutations to its spike protein, the component of the virus that binds to cells. Medical authorities around the world feared the mutations would make the latest variant both more deadly and more resistant to vaccines, although no research has confirmed that yet.

Fauci’s optimism was not shared by some of the drug companies that developed the existing vaccines.

“With Omicron we need to wait and see because we have very little information,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week.

“We may need it faster. I think we will need a fourth dose,” adding that the variant may speed up the timeline for that shot.