the new strain, president biden is urging everyone to keep calm. this variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic. we have the best vaccine in the world, the best medicines, the best scientists, and we re learning more every single day. now, the president says he does not anticipate more travel bans or any new lockdowns. the cdc is also strengthening its guidance on boosters. it says that all american adults should get one. not just a recommendation. they re saying they should. moments ago, we spoke to a south african doctor who is treating patients infected with the variant, and she described the symptoms that she s seeing. the majority of what we are presenting to primary health care practitioners are mild to moderate cases. we need to tell you what the symptoms are so that the people can understand, if i feel a bit fatigued for a day or two,
country vaccinating 40% of their population by the end of this year. to do that we need just over 500 million doses of vaccine. and here is a place by the way where we can say thank you to the u.s. which has donated about 275 million doses of the vaccine. of course the issue is not just donation but also countries being able to make this for themselves. that is the current issue of urgency, chris. that is the way to save lives and the way to make the citizens of any country safer. you know, what we ve got here is a five-alarm blaze and the world has not sent out enough fire trucks. i m with you. i get the united states is leading the way. that is not unusual.
fauci, says it could be weeks before we know more about the severity of this mutation, and the world health organization says it may take up to a month to tell if the current vaccines are effective against omicron. meantime, the advice from health experts and the president is very familiar. if you haven t gotten a vaccine, get one. if you have, get a booster. wear a face mask. wash your hands. and practice social distancing. sooner or later we re going to see cases of this new variant here in the united states. we ll have to face this new threat just as we faced those that have come before it. this variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic. we have the best vaccine in the world, the best medicines, the best scientists, and we re learning more every single day. and we ll fight this variant with scientific and, and knowledgeable actions and speed, not chaos and confusion.
assessment. if you re vaccinated, which is required to come into the u.s., and you re taking a negative test, we think that s really key. we also have much data from mayo clinic, from harvard, from dod, that air travel is safe. we think, again, we don t want to set a precedent. we just reopened the rest of the international countries on november 8th. we ve had a huge economic hit, and the industry is just now recovering. we re not going to see a full economic recovery in the u.s. without having a recovery of the travel industry, which is absolutely critical. so we really think that it is important, again, to look at an individual s risk assessment and keep our vaccine and really underscores the vaccine need and the need for folks to continue to get vaccines. the flip side of this for the travel industry is it can t be good for travel if there is an increase in cases, an increase in hospitalizations, and rising concern about a new variant,
there are at least seven variants of interest or concern and those words mean things to clinicians. interest means one thing and concern something more. but they never got any of this hype. why? because they didn t present major threats. okay. fair point. we don t really know what the threat of this one is. let s stick with that. when you know, when you can show why there should be concern, come with it. so here is what we need to find out. and they tell us we ll know a lot of these answers in the next couple weeks. is it here? omicron more transmissible than other variants? does it cause more severe illness than the others? then of course how does it do with the vaccine? there any particular mitigation method that works better against it so we can stream line and reduce what we need to do in