It could take between two and four weeks to nail down the facts about Omicron itself, but according to Prof Salim Abdool Karim, “current vaccines’ effectiveness against hospitalisation and disease is likely to remain strong”.
Speaking at a governmental press briefing on Monday, Abdool Karim said that we don’t yet know this “definitively” but can extrapolate “based on what we know and how other variants of concern have reacted to the vaccines”.
He added, “What we do know — and this comes from many different studies — is that even over time the protection of the vaccines against variants has remained pretty good, above 90%”.
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