Wat I had been reading on Twitter that the vaccines work fine against Omicron, I guess it is too early to make a statement like that?
Yes, too early. Most of the evidence about Omicron's effects is still extremely limited and not very quantitative. I'd suggest waiting for the vaccine makers to test the efficacy of their vaccines against Omicron directly. Those results should be ready in a couple of weeks.
It's extremely unlikely that Omicron evades vaccines completely, but it is quite probable that the efficacy is decreased somewhat. But does that mean something like a 5% reduction, or a 30% reduction, remains to be seen. Those would have very different implications for what countries and vaccine makers do to respond to Omicron.
I could see them custom designing new boosters. Question though, if they do design a booster specifically for this variant, does it make it less effective for previous variants (like Delta for example?) Or is it rather like adding more code to an existing program, and the efficacy of it against previous variants doesn't decrease when it is modified to cover the new?
I'm also wondering how many more variants we can get and will we make it to the end of the Greek alphabet and get to an Omega variant? If that happened it would be so scary....aside from what comes after Omega I had a thought in my head about how symbolic the letter Omega is. It could be "The One to end them all"..... a zombie virus (many think these are fiction but we actually see zombie parasites in the natural world, there is one that latches onto the brains of ants and makes them attack each other).....imagine if there was ever a human zombie virus like that and it ended up being the Omega variant? That would almost make it seem like reality is scripted like a movie lol, like everything is leading up to that eventual final climax.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articl ... ombie-ants
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articl ... ie-spiders
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articl ... ated-virus
This last one is especially interesting
In 2014, researchers from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Aix–Marseille Université in France dug a fascinating organism out of the Siberian permafrost: a so-called giant virus, about 30,000 years old, which they named Pithovirus sibericum.
Giant viruses are called this way because, though still tiny, they are easily visible under the microscope. But there is something else that makes
P. sibericum stand apart. It is a DNA virus that contains a large number of genes — as many as 500, to be precise.
This is in stark contrast with other DNA viruses, such as the human immunodeficiency virus (
HIV), which only contains about 12 genes in all.
The size of giant viruses, as well as the fact that they contain such a large amount of DNA, can make them particularly dangerous, explain the researchers who discovered
P. sibericum since they can stick around for an extremely long time.
“Among known viruses, the giant viruses tend to be very tough, almost impossible to break open,” explain two of the virus’s discoverers, Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, in
an interview for
National Geographic.
“Special environments such as deep ocean sediments and permafrost are very good preservers of microbes [and viruses] because they are cold, anoxic [oxygen-free], and […] dark,” they add.
When “reanimated,
P. sibericum only infected amoebas — archaic unicellular organisms — but happily not humans or other animals. Yet Claverie and Abergel warn that there may be similar giant viruses buried inside the permafrost that could prove dangerous to humans.
Though they have remained safely contained so far, global heating and human action could cause them to resurface and come back to life, which might bring about unknown threats to health.
“Mining and drilling mean […] digging through these ancient layers for the first time in millions of years. If ‘viable’ [viruses] are still there, this is a good recipe for disaster.”
Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel