Fauci says it’s too early to say that omicron heralds the end of the pandemic | Public Service News

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser, said it’s too early to tell whether the omicron variant will herald a shift of the COVID-19 pandemic to endemic.

“It’s an open question whether or not omicron will be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for, because we have so much variability with new variants emerging,” Fauci said Monday at the conference in online Davos Agenda of the World Economic Forum.

The fact that mutations in the virus appear to be able to evade some immune response through vaccines and infections will make it difficult to achieve herd immunity, he said. The US official said variant-specific vaccines are not the best way to fight the disease and that inoculations that work against all strains are needed.

“We don’t want to get into a mole for each variant, where you have to do an encore against a particular variant,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You will pursue him forever.

“That’s why what we’re all looking for is to find out what are the mechanisms that induce a commonality response among all the real and potential variants that we see that can occur,” he said. he added.

Fauci, 81, said resistance to proven public health measures was also hampering the fight against COVID-19.

“We have such a degree of resistance against regular, normal, easy-to-understand public health measures,” he said. “A reluctance to wear masks, to promote vaccination, to take the kind of actions that we know if we all come together as a society, we would be much, much better off.”

Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations, said the virus appears to have the capacity to become pandemic at any time.

“Omicron has evolved very, very quickly, behaving exactly like an acute pandemic, and the virus is going to retain that capability in the future and that’s something that I think we should all be concerned about,” he said. declared.