Vaccine inequity and hesitancy has made the Omicron variant more likely, scientists say By Ivana Kottasová, CNN-Yesterday 5:43 p.m. Many of the world's richest countries have spent the past year hoarding coronavirus vaccines, buying up enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over and consistently failing to deliver on their promises to share doses with the developing world. The World Health Organization said the approach was "self-defeating" and "immoral." It might be starting to bite. A new and potentially more transmissible variant of the virus likely emerged from a region with low vaccination rates. The new variant, known as Omicron, was first identified in South Africa, although it is unclear whether it originated there or whether it was brought into the country from elsewhere in the region. What scientists do know is that the virus is much more likely to mutate in places where vaccination is low and transmission high. "It has probably emerged in another country and has been detected in South Africa, which has very, very good genomic sequencing capacity and capability ... it might well be a consequence of an outbreak, probably in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where there's not a huge amount of genomic surveillance going on and vaccination rate is low," Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, told CNN in a phone interview... https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/28/worl...-variant-vaccine-inequity-intl-cmd/index.html ---------- I'll keep saying it again and again...Variants of Concern have a high probability of being birth by individuals that are not vaccinated, countries with low vaccination rates or within individuals that are immuno-compromised. Getting vaccinated protects the world, protects your friends, protects your love ones and protects yourself. In addition, it lowers the risk of prolonging the Covid Pandemic via minimizing the birth of Variant of Concerns. The Delta Variant was bad but it can get a lot worst if a very smart Variant of Concern is birth that's deadlier than the Delta Variant. Hopefully, any future Variant of Interest or Variant of Concern are not deadlier. wrbtrader
This is a good question... a better policy would be the immediate requirement to test all travelers on arrival -- and to require a 14 day incoming quarantine on all travelers from highly impacted regions. Keep in mind that this is what we did with Ebola. The reality is that we don't have much information on Omicron yet. We don't know how infectious, severe, or vaccine evasive it is. If Omicron Is So Risky, Why Didn’t the U.S. Test Travelers Upon Arrival Before It Banned Them? The WHO has warned the world to prepare for the super-scary variant, but U.S. authorities have not imposed any new testing or tracing ahead of Monday’s travel ban. https://www.thedailybeast.com/if-om...-travelers-upon-arrival-before-it-banned-them
Spain, Sweden latest EU nations to report omicron COVID-19 cases https://www.dailysabah.com/world/eu...t-eu-nations-to-report-omicron-covid-19-cases
Let's take a look at the latest crap Covid-deniers are pushing... COVID Deniers Have an Absurd New Conspiracy Theory About Omicron https://www.thedailybeast.com/covid-deniers-have-an-absurd-new-conspiracy-theory-about-omicron COVID-19 deniers are seizing on ridiculous new theories on social media about the virus’ latest Omicron variant, suggesting that it is part of a government hoax because a rearrangement of its letters can be used to spell the word “moronic.” Australian celebrity chef Pete Evans, who was banned from Facebook and Instagram last year after spewing COVID misinformation, also posted an alt-right conspiracy theory to Telegram on Sunday that the variant was an anagram for the ‘oncomir’—which are RNA molecules linked to cancer. Others have shared posts that include a screenshot from the World Health Organization website citing the agency’s announcement of the virus’ first outbreak on January 30, 2020, and suggesting a diabolical link after the agency published a statement on the Omicron variant 666 days later on November 26, 2021. Read it at Daily Mail
Everywhere... and nowhere: https://www.yachtworld.com/yacht/2018-bavaria-c57-7925506/ Something like that anyway. I have a boat but want to upsize and live aboard permanently. I would mostly run between Martinique and Grenada, sometimes down to Panama and maybe the Pacific if restrictions ever loosen up there. Martinique is good because its the best place to make repairs particularly on european-built boats. You can buy citizenship in Grenada for $150k and get resident status in the BVIs for even less. I haven't pulled the trigger yet because I still have a home in Florida and some local commitments to fulfill. Some of my neighbors have sold their Florida homes in private sales with no listing and no realtor sign. The market is pretty hot down here.
Omicron is now detected here in Québec, Canada. Travelers coming back from Africa via the route from another country were tested at the airport upon arrival in Québec. Yet, it was first detected on Sunday in Ottawa via travelers from Africa. All of them came back from Nigeria, Africa, and then traveled to another country prior to a direct flight to Canada. I'm going to guess that other country was from the European Union or the U.K. as a travel route from Africa to Canada. wrbtrader
We Know Almost Nothing About the Omicron Variant Here’s everything we do. By Katherine J. Wu As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization on Friday. Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana and South Africa earlier this month, and very little is known about it so far. But the variant is moving fast. South Africa, the country that initially flagged Omicron to WHO this week, has experienced a surge of new cases—some reportedly in people who were previously infected or vaccinated—and the virus has already spilled across international borders into places such as Hong Kong, Belgium, Israel, and the United Kingdom. Several nations are now selectively shutting down travel to impede further spread. For instance, on Monday, the United States will start restricting travel from Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Malawi. It’s a lot of news to process, and it comes without a lot of baseline knowledge about the virus itself. Scientists around the world are still scrambling to gather intel on three essential metrics: how quickly the variant spreads; if it’s capable of causing more serious disease; and whether it might be able to circumvent the immune protection left behind by past SARS-CoV-2 infections or COVID-19 vaccines, or evade immune-focused treatments such as monoclonal antibodies. All are risks because of the sheer number of mutations Omicron appears to have picked up: More than 30 of them are in SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, the multi-tool the virus uses to crack its way into human cells—and the snippet of the pathogen that’s the central focus of nearly all of the world’s COVID-19 vaccines. Alterations like these have been spotted in other troublesome variants, including Alpha and Delta, both of which used their super-speedster properties to blaze across the globe. (Omicron is only a distant cousin of both, not a direct descendant.) If—if—Omicron moves even faster than its predecessors, we could be in for another serious pandemic gut punch. But it’s way too early to know if that’ll be the case. What’s known so far absolutely warrants attention—not panic. Viruses mutate; they always do. Not all variants of concern turn out to be, well, all that concerning; many end up being mere blips in the pandemic timeline. As Omicron knocks up against its viral competitors, it may struggle to gain a toehold; it could yet be quelled through a combination of vaccines and infection-prevention measures such as masks and distancing. Vaccine makers have already announced plans to test their shots’ effectiveness against the new variant—with data to emerge in the coming weeks—and explore new dosing strategies that might help tamp down its spread. Omicron might be set up for some success, but a lot of its future also depends on us. To help put Omicron in perspective, I caught up with Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician, virologist, and global-health expert at Emory University. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Katherine J. Wu: Why don’t we yet know for sure how worried we need to be about Omicron? Boghuma Kabisen Titanji: What we do know about the variant is this: Some of its spike-protein mutations have been seen in other variants and other lineages described earlier on in the pandemic, and have been associated with increased transmissibility and the ability of the virus to evade the immune response. What we don’t know, and what is really hard to predict, is what the combination of mutations will do together. This particular variant now appears to be outcompeting other circulating variants in South Africa—there have been these clusters of cases. That is actually what led to this variant being identified in the surveillance systems that they have in place there. That raises the concern that the variant is more transmissible or may be escaping the effects of the immune response induced by vaccines or infection from earlier strains. But we really don’t know that for sure yet...... https://www.theatlantic.com/science...what-we-know/620827/?utm_source=pocket-newtab ---------- wrbtrader
COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness will likely drop against omicron variant, Moderna CEO says Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, said in an interview published Tuesday that current vaccines for COVID-19 will likely be much less effective against the new omicron variant. "I think it’s going to be a material drop," he told the Financial Times. "I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data." He told the paper that he does not believe there is a "world" where the effectiveness is the same level that vaccines had with the Delta variant. He said he’s spoken to scientists who told him that this variant is "not going to be good." He also said it could be months before pharmaceutical companies can produce vaccines at scale to counter omicron Read more at https://www.foxbusiness.com/healthc...ness-will-likely-drop-against-omicron-variant