Lamda Variant News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

You would know whether or not the current vaccines are effective against this variant? >> well, we're 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 that's how the vaccines were made and you compare it to the neutralizing agents against the omicron variant and almost certainly you'll see a decrease. we've seen that before with the beta variant that ...

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 evades our current vaccines. moderna is sounding the alarm saying omicron represents a significant pot...

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, let's go vaccinate the african people. >> and even without this new variant, hospitalizations in the u.s. are rising again. we're averaging more than 1,000 deaths per day. how bad could things get if omicron is a nasty variant that does cause more hospitalizations, more problems with being more transmissible and so o...

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 it's in parts of western europe and eastern europe at the moment. but you see these early signs that the numbers are rising in this part of the coun...

Dean of tropical medicine at baylor college of medicine dr. peter hotez. dr. hotez, all of this sounds very worrisome. dr. fauci says he wouldn't be surprised if this new variant is already in the u.s. what do you think? do you think it's here? i mean, i think it's probably safe to assume it's somewhere here. >> yeah, it's likely here, jim. part of it, the problem is, are centers for disease control has underperformed in terms of genomic testing. we've never gotten it up to the level that we really need it. i think, though, there's a few things we have to keep in mind and keep things in perspe...