India Narrative

  The World Health Organization has warned that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is spreading at an unprecedented rate and urged countries to act WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists that the strain had been reported in 77 countries and had probably spread to most nations undetected "at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant". At the same time the WHO on Tuesday also gave reason for some optimism, saying Africa had recorded a massive rise in cases over the past week but the number of deaths were lower than the previous waves. However, it urged countries to act swiftly to rein in transmission and protect their health systems and warned against complacency. WHO expert Bruce Aylward emphasised against "jumping to a conclusion that this is a mild disease". "We could be setting ourselves up for a very dangerous situation," he added. Omicron, first identified by South Africa and reported to the WHO in late November, has over 30 spike ...

  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....

  Existing vaccines will still protect people who contract the Omicron variant from severe Covid-19 cases, according to a top World Health Organization (WHO) official. "We have highly effective vaccines that have proved effective against all the variants so far, in terms of severe disease and hospitalisation, and there's no reason to expect that it wouldn't be so for Omicron,” Dr Mike Ryan, the WHO's emergencies director, told AFP news agency. His observation comes at a time when the first lab tests of the heavily mutated new variant in South Africa suggest it can partially evade the Pfizer vaccine. Researchers say there was a "very large drop" in how well the vaccine's antibodies neutralised the new strain. But Ryan said there was no sign Omicron would be better at evading vaccines than other variants. He also said that initial data suggested that the COVID-19 symptoms in the case of Omicron were less severe than the Delta and other strains. Scientists ...