Category Archives: Omicron variant

Covid live: fourth vaccine dose ‘could be needed against Omicron’; France ‘could soon have 100,000 cases per day’

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Latest updates: German health minister says ‘offensive booster campaign’ needed to fight variant; French health minister says Omicron will be dominant in early January

Researchers in Melbourne, Australia, have turned one of the world’s most-used blood-thinning drugs into a nasal spray which they hope could prevent Covid-19 transmission.

Northern Health medical divisional director Don Campbell and researchers at Melbourne, Monash and Oxford Universities found that heparin can block the transmission of Covid-19 and prevent infection.

It won’t matter if a new variant comes along, this drug will block that protein from infecting the cells.

I’m very confident that we can demonstrate that it will work, and people will be using this before they go to the shops and before they go to school.”

Due to large-scale flooding near the Port of Vancouver … and the global supply chain crunch caused by the coronavirus pandemic, there are delays in the supply of potatoes.”

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Israeli PM announces fourth Covid jab for over-60s to tackle Omicron

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Booster will also be available to medical teams and immunodeficient people four months after third dose

Israel is set to become the first country in the world to offer a fourth dose of Covid-19 vaccines in an effort to protect against the Omicron variant.

People over the age of 60 and healthcare workers will be eligible for a second booster shot, the prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said on Tuesday night, following a recommendation made by Israel’s panel of pandemic experts.

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Omicron is exploding – but scientists are better prepared than for any past variant | Manon Ragonnet-Cronin

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We’re making progress in the arms race against the virus, but work in the lab must be supported by public health measures

It’s beginning to feel a lot like last Christmas. Case numbers of a new Covid variant are exploding across the UK, and the prime minister is cautioning that restrictions may be called for. But while the threat of Omicron likely surpasses that of previous variants, our tools to track and combat the virus have also advanced since last year.

The world was alerted to Omicron by the Botswanan and South African scientists who first sequenced the novel variant on 24 November, and it was designated as a variant of concern by the World Health Organization two days later. It was immediately obvious to them that they had something alarming on their hands when they saw the large number of mutations in the Omicron genome.

Dr Manon Ragonnet-Cronin is an MRC Fellow at Imperial College London and a member of the Imperial College Covid-19 response team

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