There's no guarantee the sequels of omicron will cause milder illness or that existing vaccines will work against them.
Cecilia Vega, ABC News chief White House correspondent, analyzes the latest developments in the Biden administration's COVID-19 response.
Getting progressively better at evading immunity helps a virus to survive over the long term. When SARS-CoV-2 first struck, no one was immune. But infections and vaccines have conferred at least some immunity to much of the world, so the virus must adapt. When new variants do develop, scientists said it's still very difficult to know from genetic features which ones might take off. For example, omicron has many more mutations than previous variants, around 30 in the spike protein that lets it attach to human cells. But the so-called IHU variant identified in France and being monitored by the WHO has 46 mutations and doesn't seem to have spread much at all.
"I have no doubt at all that these viruses are going to continue to mutate and we're going to be dealing with this for a very long time," she said. Tedros said he'd like to see 70% of people in every country vaccinated by mid-year. Currently, there are dozens of countries where less than a quarter of the population is fully vaccinated, according to Johns Hopkins University statistics. And in the United States, many people continue to resist available vaccines.
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