Variant “Omicron”: “If there is a case in Belgium, there is already in France” – LCI

It did not take more than a few hours for the variant dubbed “Omicron” to cause a wave of panic. Its discovery was announced Thursday in South Africa, where 22 people were officially infected with this new strain of Covid-19, potentially very contagious and with multiple mutations. Since then, “Omicron” has been detected all around the planet and the World Health Organization (WHO) has already qualified it as “worrying”.

As the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) judges the risk of it spreading in Europe “high to very high”, the first case on the Old Continent was announced this Friday in Belgium. “This is someone who came from abroad. Tested positively on November 22. Who was not vaccinated.”, explained the Belgian Minister of Health, Frank Vandenbroucke. His cabinet clarified that this person came from Egypt, had transited through Turkey and arrived in Belgium on November 11.

If no case has yet been diagnosed in France, Vincent Enouf, deputy director of the reference center for respiratory viruses at the Institut Pasteur, considers it very likely that several people have despite everything already been infected in the country. “If there is a case in Belgium, there is already one in France. It is only that it has not yet been detected or sequenced. It is a process which takes a few days”, he explains.

However, the scientist wants to be reassuring. “Vaccination coverage in France is still much greater than where this virus was detected, where it is 20 to 30%. In addition, where it is circulating today, there is much less Delta virus than what we have today in France. So we can ask the question of the competition between these two viruses, if this new virus were to arrive in France. Will it be strong enough to fight the variant? Delta? It’s all a mystery “, he says, hoping that the vaccine manufacturers are now looking into the question of their effectiveness with this variant.

“We know that it has mutations that could allow it to diffuse better, to bind better to our cells and to infect us better. But the most worrying is that it could cause a decrease in the efficiency of our vaccines. One can very well imagine that some of the antibodies that we have developed no longer recognize this virus and neutralize it poorly “, he notes, recalling nevertheless that all this remains to be verified. This Friday evening, Moderna announced its intention to develop a specific booster dose for the Omicron variant. Ditto for BioNTech, ally of Pfizer, which lets itself “no later than two weeks” to study it.