Geneva: The WHO has now said that early data indicates the Omicron Covid variant may more easily reinfect people who have already had the virus or been vaccinated than previous variants, but could also cause milder disease.
“Emerging data from South Africa suggests increased risk of reinfection with Omicron,” World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters, adding that “there is also some evidence that Omicron causes milder disease than Delta”.
Even if it does turn out that Omicron causes less severe disease, Tedros warned against slacking off vigilance against the virus.
“Any complacency now will cost lives,” he warned.
WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan agreed, pointing out that so far the data indicates the variant is “efficiently transmitting, and probably more efficiently transmitting even than the Delta variant.”
“That does not mean that the virus is unstoppable,” he said.
“But it means the virus is more efficient at transmitting between human beings. And therefore we have to redouble our efforts to break those chains of transmission to protect ourselves to protect others.”
Chief WHO scientist Soumya Swaminathan cautioned against knee-jerk reactions to early studies hinting that 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, from four to 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.
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