UA new variant of the coronavirus, called Omicron, has been discovered in South Africa and qualified as “of concern” by the WHO.
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“It was qualified as worrying because it is important to have more information on this variant”Sylvie Briand, director of the epidemic risk management department at the WHO, said Friday, November 26 on Franceinco, after the discovery of a new variant in South Africa. Called Omicron by the World Health Organization which classified it as “worrying”. This decision was made so that “All teams around the world are collecting more information on this variant.”
franceinfo: What do we know about this new variant that the WHO qualifies as worrying?
Sylvie Briand : We called it of concern because it is important to have more information about this variant. We don’t know much about it. We just know that it has a lot of mutations and that makes us fear that they will lead to less efficacy of the vaccines, that’s why we have to see its impact on the populations it infects and then make studies to find out if the tools we have with us such as vaccines remain effective. Rather, it is an alert for more attention to be paid to this variant and for all teams around the world to collect more information on this variant.
More transmission, more contagion, more dangerousness too?
Not necessarily. Most people who are frail are vaccinated in Europe. We can see very well on the epidemiological curves in Europe that even if there are a lot of cases, the curve of deaths and hospitalizations remains much lower than what we had seen in the wave of 2020. That a variant is more transmissible doesn’t mean it’s going to be more virulent.
Do we have the means to adapt to these variants?
It is certain that the new technologies to manufacture the new messenger RNA vaccines allow faster manufacturing. As long as we have the genetic sequence to use for the vaccine, we can shorten production times. This is very encouraging, it means that we are much more responsive than for other vaccines like influenza for which it takes about six months to produce the vaccines in numbers. Once we know what part of the antigen we want to put in the vaccine, we can produce it in large numbers. The production is different depending on the vaccine platforms.