The nation’s top infectious disease doctor said Sunday the omicron COVID-19 variant will ‘inevitably’ reach the United States, even as he maintained that it is too early to say whether lockdowns or new mask mandates will be required.
“Inevitably, it will be here,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said of the variant on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday. “The question is, will we be prepared for it?”
“the preparation that we have ongoing for what we’re doing now with the Delta variant just needs to be revved up,” he continued, adding: “The bottom line of that is the preparation by getting more and more people vaccinated and getting the fully vaccinated boosted.”
“If and when – and it’s going to be when – it comes here, hopefully we will be ready for it by enhancing our capabilities via vaccine, masking — all the things that we do, and should be doing,” Fauci told host George Stephanopoulos.
His remarks come just two days after the U.S. said it would restrict travel for non-U.S. citizens from South Africa and seven other countries starting Monday in an effort to slow the spread of the variant, which has already been detected in Britain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong.
On Sunday afternoon, President Biden said that he will “have more to say” on travel restrictions, including the possiblity of further action, following a meeting with Dr. Fauci and his members of his COVID-19 response team upon his return to the White House later that day.
Omicron was labeled a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization on Friday, becoming the first strain of the coronavirus to receive that label since the emergence of the delta variant earlier this year.
On Sunday, Fauci said early signs “strongly suggest” omicron might be more transmissible than earlier variants, and could potentially evade monoclonal antibodies or “perhaps even antibodies that are induced by [the COVID-19] vaccine.”
“It has a bunch of mutations,” Fauci said of omicron, including “a disturbingly large number of mutations in the spike protein, which is the business end of the virus.”
Still, Fauci maintained that it was too early to tell whether new lockdowns or mask mandates will be needed: “We just really need to, as I’ve said so often, prepare for the worst,” Fauci told Stephanopoulos.
“And it may not be that we’re going to have to go the route people are saying,” Fauci said. “We’ll make decisions based on the science and evidence, as we always do.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, sought to emphasize that there is no data yet to suggest the new omicron variant causes more serious illness than delta, though its swift spread would indicate that it is highly contagious.
“I do think it’s more contagious [than previous variants] when you look at how rapidly it spread through multiple districts in South Africa,” Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“It has the earmarks, therefore, of being particularly likely to spread from one person to another,” he said, adding: “What we don’t know is whether it can compete with delta.”
Collins said Sunday that it will take “two or three weeks” of laboratory and field study before researchers can discern whether antibodies generated by the COVID-19 vaccines or previous infections will be effective against the new variant.
“This is early enough that it’s hard to be sure we know the answers,” Collins said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“That‘s what a lot of us are spending our time on,” he continued. “Over the last three days, I think I’ve been on Zoom calls and phone calls pretty much continuously. We do know this is a variant that has a lot of mutations — like 50 of them.”
Meanwhile, both Fauci and Collins said Sunday that the emergence of omicron should serve as yet another wake-up call for Americans who are not yet vaccinated or boosted against COVID-19.
“Whether or not we’re headed into a bleak or bleaker winter is really going to depend upon what we do,” Fauci said. “So this is a clarion call, as far as I’m concerned, of saying let’s put aside all of these differences that we have and say, ‘if you’re not vaccinated, get vaccinated. If you’re fully vaccinated, get boosted, and get the children vaccinated also.’ We now have time.”
“I know, America, you’re really tired of hearing these things–but the virus is not tired of us, and it’s shape-shifting itself,” Collins said on CNN’s “This Week.”
“If you imagine we’re on a racetrack here, the virus just sort of emerged in a new version and it’s trying to catch up with us, and we have to use every kind of tool in our toolbox to keep from getting in a situation that makes this worse,” he added.
“We don’t know yet how much of an impact this will have,” Dr. Collins said. “It ought to redouble our efforts to use the tools that we have, which are vaccinations and boosters, and to be sure we’re getting those to the rest of the world, too, which the US is doing more than any other country.”
“It also means we need to pay attention to those mitigation strategies that people are just really sick of, like wearing masks while indoors with other people who might not be vaccinated and keeping that social distance issue,” he continued. “We have to use every kind of tool in our toolbox to keep (Omicron) from getting in a situation that makes this worse.”
