Health
Dr. Fauci warns past covid infection doesn’t offer ‘good protection’ against new variant
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
- Dr. Anthony Fauci says having a past COVID-19 infection doesn’t give much protection against the BA.5 strain.
- Fauci said that the new omicron BA.5 subvariant “substantially evades” antibodies from both vaccination and prior infection.
- The BA.5 subvariant now makes up the majority of COVID-19 cases in the United States.
After weeks of battling COVID-19 last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that people who were infected with COVID-19 during the first Omicron wave will not have much protection against the latest omicron BA.5 subvariant.
“Omicron as a broad category has been particularly problematic,” Fauci said during a Tuesday White House briefing. “Each successive variant has a bit of a transmission advantage over the prior one.”
The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said at the briefing that those infected in the first waves “really don’t have a lot of good protection” against the latest BA.5 subvariant.
Due to the high degree of transmissibility of this variant, vaccines don’t “protect overly well” against infection. However, Fauci said that vaccines “protect quite well against severe disease leading to hospitalization and death. This new variant, he said, “substantially evades” antibodies from both vaccination and prior infection.
Health experts agree that vaccination and up-to-date booster shots have been proven to substantially reduce the risk of ending up in the ICU with a serious infection.
Fauci, one of the country’s top infectious disease experts, said the new BA.5 variant currently accounts for 64% of cases in the U.S.
He acknowledged that BA.5 and future COVID-19 variants will keep appearing as long as the virus spreads unchecked.
“Variants will continue to emerge if the virus circulates globally and in this county. We should not let it disrupt our lives, but we cannot deny that it is a reality that we need to deal with,” he said.
“It’s something that A, we don’t panic on, B, we don’t let it disrupt our lives, but we take it seriously enough and utilize the tools that we have to mitigate,” Fauci later added.
Source: The Hill
CharlieSeattle
July 13, 2022 at 6:36 pm
Why are there never comments …anywhere on this lousy site?
Mike Tracy
July 14, 2022 at 7:03 am
Fauci is so full of shit! I have never taken the vaccine and will never! I had covid before there was ever a vacine, and I have a natural immunity that doesn’t prevent me from association with people that do have cavid, including all the newfangled variants Fauci and his cohorts keeps fabricating. He is so Full of Shit his breath reaks of the bribery money he receives from the pharmaceutical companies that are proffiting from new vaccines every time that criminal speaks. All you people that were gullable enough to take the vaccine are in trouble if you don’t let your body build it’s own natural immunity to diseases it encounters. These vaccines, Fauci and Biden and Big-pharma are pushing are destroying peoples natural abilities to build immunity to any disease or virus they encounter, there’s all new evidence of it. Biden and Fauci should get all this vaccine pumped up their asses until they both explode so we can all get back to some sort of normalcy.