Lamda Variant News Today

You would know whether or not the current vaccines are effective against this variant? >> well, were going get think think in the next week and a half, to the next two weeks so our vaccine group, the way you do that is you take either experimental animals or individuals who have been vaccinated with your vaccine and you measure virus neutralizing antibodies against the original lineage because thats how the vaccines were made and you compare it to the neutralizing agents against the omicron vari...

Hong kong, and within the last few years, italy, germany, and the uk also announced they had detected cases within their borders. british prime minister boris johnson says scientists are learning more about the variant by the hour. >> it does appear that omicron spreads fvery rapidly and can b spread between people who are double vaccinated. >> that right there is the worst case scenario, what scientists have long warned about unmitigated spread and what it could lead to, a super variant that ev...

Unvaccinated populations. alpha came out of the unvaccinated population in the uk in 2020. delta the unvaccinated population, india, 2021. now omicron, among unvaccinated population in africa. if the g7 leaders are serious about stopping new variants, forget about the travel bans, lets go vaccinate the african people. >> and even without this new variant, hospitalizations in the u.s. are rising again. were averaging more than 1,000 deaths per day. how bad could things get if omicron is a nasty v...

Jim? >> and how bad is it there right now? do you get to live your life normally down there, david, or is it like it is in a lot of other countries where people are wearing masks and there are disruptions everywhere you go. >> reporter: there is a mask mandate, and that is being enforced from the severally days of the pandemic, jim. but in terms of restrictions they are light right now. in terms of the state of the pandemic, nowhere near as bad as its in parts of western europe and eastern europ...

Dean of tropical medicine at baylor college of medicine dr. peter hotez. dr. hotez, all of this sounds very worrisome. dr. fauci says he wouldnt be surprised if this new variant is already in the u.s. what do you think? do you think its here? i mean, i think its probably safe to assume its somewhere here. >> yeah, its likely here, jim. part of it, the problem is, are centers for disease control has underperformed in terms of genomic testing. weve never gotten it up to the level that we really ne...

The other variants. another point to keep in mind. and in terms of whether or not this variant is going to resist the immune response to our current vaccines, its possible, but its unlikely to be totally resistant. it may be partially resistant, just like other variants like the b 1351 from south africa, remember that one, the beta variant. and the lamda variant. and those never really took off even though they had a lot of concerning mutations in the spike protein. so well know about how effect...

Thats going to be a vital piece of information. for instance, our scientists at texas childrens hospital and baylor are now looking exactly at that, the immune response to our vaccine, see figure it cross neutralizes omicron. thats going to be a key point. the most important thing we really need to know right now is how transmissible is this variant. yes, its taken off in the province that contains pretoria and johannesburg, but is it sufficient to outcompete the delta variant? and i dont really...

That will slow down economic activity. therefore, companies and corporations will not know how to react. will we -- ill give a blunt example here. lets just say omicron does expand and does become a variant of greater concern, what happens to all the return-to-work policies, including in our own at warnermedia, cnn, january tenth, what happens to that if this get worse? and that level of uncertainty is what is going to spook markets and spook investors, and its perfectly logical. >> yeah. i dont...

Ayman? >> thanks to the boast you for starting us off this hour. joining me now to continue the conversation, a disease specialist and epidemiologist at the new york school of medicine and also a member of then president-elect bidens transition team. dr. glyndwr, welcome back to the show. as things stand today as we look at the big picture of this pandemic. dr. fauci says that he fears that there is a variant worse than delta coming. how concerned are you about that? are we equipped to handle so...

Lambda is latest mutation threatening pandemic recovery. Author: Keristen Holmes Updated: 6:24 PM PDT July 7, 2021 SAN DIEGO — The State of California lifted its COVID-19 restrictions less than a month ago and now news of variants has doctors all across the globe concerned. First, the Delta variant thats been found in California. Now the Lambda variant out of South America has been deemed the variant of interest by the World Health Organization. Yaneer Bar-Yam ...