President Joe Biden will provide an update on his administration’s response to the newly discovered omicron variant of COVID-19 on Monday, the White House announced Sunday night.
The announcement follows Biden’s meeting with members of his White House COVID Response Team, as well as his chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Dr. Fauci told Biden that it will take about two weeks “to have more definitive information on the transmissibility, severity, and other characteristics of the variant,” but he importantly noted that the existing COVID-19 vaccines “are likely to provide a degree of protection against severe cases” of the coronavirus.
“Dr. Fauci also reiterated that boosters for fully vaccinated individuals provide the strongest available protection from COVID,” the White House said in a statement. “The COVID Response Team’s immediate recommendation to all vaccinated adults is to get a booster shot as soon as possible; all adults are eligible for a booster if they were vaccinated six months ago or more with Pfizer or Moderna, or two months ago or more with Johnson & Johnson. Importantly, those adults and children who are not yet fully vaccinated should get vaccinated immediately.”
The variant was first identified days ago in South Africa and was classified by the World Health Organization on Friday as a variant of concern, the first strain of the coronavirus to receive that designation since the delta variant.
Over the weekend, Biden instituted new travel restrictions from South Africa and seven other nations beginning Monday. Several other nations also implemented similar restrictions in recent days, including the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
The variant has already been detected in Britain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Israel, the Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong.
Dr. Fauci said earlier Sunday that the omicron 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?”
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said 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.
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.”
Spectrum News’ Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report.
