The main adviser to the President of the United States, Joe Biden, for the crisis generated by the pandemic of the new coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, said this Sunday (5) that the first signs about the seriousness of the Ômicron variant, coming from South Africa, are “ rather encouraging.” He also stressed that the data is still preliminary. The doctor made the statement in an interview with CNN americana.
According to Fauci, so far, although it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, “it cannot be said that (the variant) presents a high degree of severity”, he said.
“The signs about gravity are quite encouraging.”
First identified in South Africa less than a month ago, the variant has already spread to around 40 countries on five continents and, according to information from this period, has a greater capacity for infection than the Delta variant.
In the United States, the first case was registered less than a week ago and is already present in 15 states.
Vaccination
On Friday (3), the director of the emergency health program of the World Health Organization (WHO), Michael Ryan, said it was time to distribute doses more evenly around the globe, not adapt the composition of vaccines against Covid-19 to the Ômicron variant. He added that the immunization agents used today are “highly effective” and that, if it is necessary to “change them”, scientists are already studying how.
“Now, there’s no need to change the vaccines we use, there’s no evidence to support that,” Ryan said in a live YouTube broadcast.
“We have highly effective vaccines that are working. We have to focus on making them more evenly distributed. We need to vaccinate those who are most at risk.”
According to Alexandre Naime Barbosa, head of the infectious diseases sector at Unesp Botucatu (SP) and consultant to the Brazilian Society of Infectious Diseases, it is not possible to say that the new variant escapes the coverage offered by vaccines that are already on the market. There has not been enough time or studies to demonstrate this hypothesis.
“It takes a study with thousands of patients. The data, for the time being, does not mean absolutely anything”, he said.
He recalls that the main objective of the vaccine is to prevent the disease from worsening. So far, no deaths have been confirmed by the new variant.
Reference: CNN Brasil
