New Delhi: The idea of achieving flock immunity through natural infections to fight Covid is “stupid” because there is a large fee to be paid, the head of scientist in the World Health Organization Dr. Soumya Swaminathan told NDTV today, adding that which always maintained this holder. About the new Omicron sub-variant, he said that BA2 was stronger than BA.1 and transmissions more than other sub-variants. It took the grip in several countries, especially India and Denmark, he added.
Dr. Swaminathan said that the global health body has not been able to comment on the omicron impact because the relatively new variants and studies still occur to determine whether it can cause reinfection and how it affects long-term immunity. “Two months too little to find out whether it causes reinfection and how it affects long-term immunity. We see some research where the blood of patients recovering from new variants helps with delta infections but we do not know whether it will happen true for future variants , “he said.
About how the vaccine currently responds to Omicron, he said that Lab level research shows antibodies tend to neutralize new variants, even less than the Delta variant which is already less responsive to the previous variants that are brought into the account variant while developing a vaccine. However, the good news is that clinical data shows fewer cases of death and severe disease in vaccinated patients. No need to worry about whether the vaccine is currently working on omicron tensions, he said.
“The vaccine we use for protection in terms of reducing hospitalization and death works very well. Everything helps us. Elderly and vulnerable much better protected now. This shows that the vaccine is an effective and good defense mechanism,” he said, adding that we It should not take into account the antibody response but also carefully look at clinical data and learn other factors such as cell-t responses.
“Hybrid immunity is the strongest immunity we can have today – hybrid is when someone has been infected with Omicron and also gets a vaccine dose,” he said.
On whether there will be more mutations, he says that it is a RNA virus and it’s natural to keep mutating.
WHO has discussed a universal vaccine working against all virus variants, he told. “The Pan-Coronavirus vaccine or the Pan-SAR vaccine is a holy cup and will be ideal. Scientifically, it makes sense and maybe, but all of this is being worked on and we have to wait and see,” he said and compare it to an effort to make a universal influenza vaccine. At present, influenza shooting must be modified every year due to new strains.