WHO: It is “highly unlikely” that existing vaccines will be ineffective against the omicron strain

Existing Covid-19 vaccines are “highly unlikely” to provide any protection against the omicron strain and have not been shown to cause more serious illnesses than previous Covid-19 strains, Michael Ryan said the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) emergency director on Tuesday.

Rainen told AFP that there is still a lot to be learned about the highly mutated strain of omicron, but preliminary data show that it does not cause more serious disease than delta and other strains.

“Preliminary data do not indicate that the disease is more severe. In fact, they indicate a less serious illness, ”said Ryan in an interview, but insisted that further research was needed. “This is a very early time, we need to be very careful about how we interpret this signal.”

At the same time, work has been completed on the first studies in the Republic of South Africa to find out how effective the current vaccines are against the new strain of the virus. Leading researcher Alex Sigals succinctly said after the first data was published that the situation was better than he had expected.

We have completed our first experiments on neutralization of Omicron by Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccination elicited immunity

Manuscript available at https://t.co/rGaEB9GdmS

and should be available on medRxiv in the coming days

– Alex Sigal (@sigallab) December 7, 2021

The WHO also stated that there were no indications that the omicron strain could completely circumvent the protection provided by existing Covid-19 vaccines.

“We have very effective vaccines that have proven effective against all types of illness and hospitalization to date,” said Ryan, a 56-year-old epidemiologist and former traumatologist.

“There’s no reason to expect that to be the case,” Ryan said. He referred to early data from South Africa, where the strain was first found, which “suggests that the vaccine is at least protective”.

He acknowledged that existing vaccines might be less effective against the omicron strain, which has more than 30 mutations in the peak protein, but called it “very unlikely” that the strain would completely avoid the protection provided by the vaccines.