Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Jerrol Thompson during his usual Monday appearance on WEFM’s Wake Up morning program stated that vaccines have been proven so far, to still be very effective against COVID-19 variants.
“What we’ve found so far is that the vaccines are still very effective; each variant may have some sort of impact on that to a small degree, but overall the vaccines are still very effective.” Thompson said.
He goes on to state that there is no current variant that has fully fledged resistance to COVID-19 vaccines.
“There is no variant right now that has developed resistance, full-fledged resistance—maybe they might have a slight increase in resistance—but no full-fledged resistance to the vaccines.” He said.
Dr. Thompson then explained that not every variant of a virus pans out to be devastating, according to him, some have the possibility to be a detriment to themselves due to their mutations.
“Not every variant is for the betterment of that virus, most of them fizzle out and we’ve seen some variants that look terrible because of the amount of mutations; really and truly they are gone in a short space of time. It does not necessarily mean that this Omicron will pan out to be anything big, but we have to watch it” he said.
Dr. Thompson in a recent call to the Issues at Hand program stated that the Omicron variant has 32 mutations, very high when compared to the 8 mutations of the Delta variant.
