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WHO 'confident' current COVID-19 vaccines will work against Omicron

Omicron: Vaccines 'alone' will not prevent impact of new COVID variant, says ECDC

"Vaccination alone will not allow us to prevent the impact of the Omicron variant, because there will be no time to address the vaccination gaps that still exist," said Dr Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

COVID-19 Omicron variant: 'Don't enact travel restrictions, we know they don't work'

In a bid to quell the spread of the new Omicron variant, first identified in South Africa, dozens of countries are beefing up entry restrictions. All the while, scientists are racing to learn more about the variant in a bid to stave off the worst case scenario. To get a fuller understanding of the latest COVID mutation the world is now facing, France 24 is joined by Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. While Dr. Adalja believes there is still a lot more to learn about this latest variant, he's warning that "there's enough that we need to take this very seriously and run this down." The reason Dr. Adalja is so concerned, at this early stage, is because "there are a lot of mutations in this variant that seem to have the ability to possibly make this transmit more rapidly as well as evade some of the immunity from vaccines." In the meantime, Dr. Adalja insists that the best way to combat this new variant is through widespread vaccination. "It's not surprising that this variant was first discovered, and is spreading in a country, where there's only about 25% of the population fully vaccinated," explains Dr. Adalja. "The more this virus gets the ability to infect people, the more variants it can generate."

COVID Vaccines To Work On South Africa Strain