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WHO says no evidence yet to support tailoring COVID-19 vaccines to Omicron – Metro US

WHO says no evidence yet to support tailoring COVID-19 vaccines to Omicron

Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO attends a news conference
Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO attends a news conference on the Ebola outbreak at the United Nations in Geneva

(Reuters) – The World Health Organization’s emergencies director, Mike Ryan, said on Friday there was no evidence to support a change in COVID-19 vaccines to tailor them to the Omicron variant.

Ryan, speaking at a social media event, said that if needed, however, the work was already underway in case Omicron-specific vaccines were needed.

“Right now, we have highly effective vaccines that are working. We need to focus on getting them more equitably distributed. We need to focus on getting people most at risk vaccinated,” Ryan said.

The agency said earlier on Friday that it was still studying the transmissibility and severity of the new variant.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra and Amruta Khandekar in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)