WHO says Omicron is not unstoppable, vaccines work against new Covid strain

 

Chief WHO scientist Soumya Swaminathan has cautioned against knee-jerk reactions to early studies that hinted the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may have reduced efficacy against the new variant.

She pointed out that the studies done so far were small and that the reduction in the "neutralising activity" varied dramatically between different studies. five fold in some experiments to up to 40-fold in others.

They also only looked at the neutralisation of antibodies, when "we know the immune system is much more complex than that," she said.

"So I think it's premature to conclude that this reduction neutralising activity would result in a significant reduction in vaccine effectiveness," she said. "We do not know that."

The WHO experts stressed the importance of vaccination, highlighting that even if vaccines prove less effective against Omicron, as some data indicates, they are still expected to provide significant protection against severe disease.

WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan so far the data indicates the variant is "efficiently transmitting, and probably more efficiently transmitting even than the Delta variant."