Vaccines are the 'working seatbelts' for dealing with the Omicron coronavirus va

The Omicron variant is the latest mutant strain of the coronavirus to spark concern across the globe.

Reports so far indicate that the variant is causing mild symptoms and not leading to notably increased hospitalizations or deaths in vaccinated individuals. Furthermore, the latest data from BioNTech (BNTX) and Pfizer (PFE) suggest that a three-dose regimen — essentially getting a two-dose Pfizer vaccination and then a booster — was able to neutralize the new Omicron variant in a laboratory test.

Consequently, one physician isn’t as concerned as he was before vaccines were publicly available.

“We’re fully vaccinated now,” Dr. Calvin Sun, a New York City-based emergency medicine physician, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “Last year, there was no vaccine made available to the public. Therefore, if something like Omicron came around last year without a vaccine, it’s like driving down a highway when it’s about to get busier and busier without a seatbelt made available to us.”

“Where we stand right now is that most of the people who are unvaccinated are the ones being hospitalized, at least 85% from the emerging data,” Sun said. “It’s actually showing that the disease with at least the predominantly fully vaccinated is a mild course if you are to be infected. But for the fully unvaccinated, the chances of being hospitalized are way higher.”

On Wednesday, Pfizer announced that all three doses of its vaccine regimen (the two initial doses, plus a booster) were shown to be effective in producing antibodies against Omicron.

Part of the content is taken from Yahoo.