[Epoch Times, December 16, 2021]The World Health Organization said on Wednesday (December 15) that preliminary evidence suggests that vaccines may not be effective in responding to infections and spreading new variants of COVID-19, Omicron, and Omicron also has a higher value. The risk of reinfection.
In its “Weekly epidemiological update on COVID-19,” the WHO said that more data is needed to better understand the extent to which Omicron may evade immunity, including vaccines or previous Immunity produced by infection.
“Therefore, the overall risk associated with the new must-be-concerned variant Omicron remains high.” WHO said. This statement echoes the comments made by officials of the organization in an online briefing on Tuesday.
According to the WHO, since the main variant Delta was listed as a variant of concern in April, the percentage of Delta sequences registered in the Global Shared Influenza Data Initiative (GISAID) database this week is similar to other variants of concern. It is down from the first time.
However, the WHO pointed out that this needs to be interpreted with caution, because countries may conduct targeted sequencing of Omicron, so there are fewer sequences uploaded for all other variants, including Delta.
However, the Delta variant still dominates, accounting for 99.2% of the nearly 880,000 sequences uploaded to GISAID, samples of these sequences were collected in the past 60 days.
However, with the emergence of Omicron variants, the proportion of Alpha, Beta, and Gamma variants has shown a downward trend. Of the total, about 3755 (0.4%) are Omicron, and the other three must be concerned with a total of 401 variants, each less than 0.1% proportion.
(Source: Reuters)
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