LONDON (Reuters) – England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said on Wednesday that the Omicron coronavirus variant posed a really serious threat and that what health officials already knew about it was “bad”.
“This is a really serious threat at the moment. The how big a threat – there are several things we don’t know, but all the things that we do know, are bad,” Whitty told a news conference.
“And the principle one being the speed at which this is moving, it is moving at an absolutely phenomenal pace.”
He added: “We do have some things going for us this time of which the most important is the existence of effective vaccines and the ability to boost at speed at this stage.”
(Reporting by William Schomberg and Andrew MacAskill; editing by Michael Holden)
