africa, it is a young population with heavy levels of infection previously, but we have not seen those high levels of infection so it may be a more mild disease and we need to wait and see whether that translates in its severity or lack of severity here. nevertheless, it is clearly quite widely diverging from the original wuhan strain and it is likely that if omicron becomes the dominant strain we will have two... in my view it would be prudent to develop variant vaccines so what i think would be annual posts, certainly for the vulnerable, will be against omicron as opposed to wuhan, 38 mutation is also different from where we are now —— the annual boosts. i think the government is right to be taking it seriously but let's see how severe