were either canceled or that we were not allowed to board. reporter: but today president joe biden tried to assure the american people that these are precautionary measures. this variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic. reporter: and he along with other top health officials continue to echo one main message. get vaccinated. please, folks, if you have been on the fence, i m not a politician. i m a scientist. maybe we can even ask all the politicians to agree on this one. get your vaccine. get your booster. it s the best chance we ve got to drive this covid-19 pandemic away. jake, as we have been saying, there s still a lot we don t know about this new coronavirus omicron, including whether or not it evades vaccines. in fact, if it indeed does, pfizer and biontech staying is prepared to adapt its vaccines within six weeks. johnson & johnson also saying it is pursuing an omicron specific vaccine as well. as you heard from president biden and public health
Were either canceled or that we were not allowed to board. reporter: but today president joe biden tried to assure the american people that these are precautionary measures. this variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic. reporter: and he along with other top health officials continue to echo one main message. get vaccinated. please, folks, if you have been on the fence, i m not a politician. i m a scientist. maybe we can even ask all the politicians to agree on this one. get your vaccine. get your booster. it s the best chance we ve got to drive this covid-19 pandemic away. jake, as we have been saying, there s still a lot we don t know about this new coronavirus omicron, including whether or not it evades vaccines. in fact, if it indeed does, pfizer and biontech staying is prepared to adapt its vaccines within six weeks. johnson & johnson also saying it is pursuing an omicron specific
Protect against this variant. you said that pcr tests, coronavirus tests, should detect cases of this new variant. but what about those that use the at-home rapid tests. could omicron be more widespread than the ability to track it because those tests don t work on omicron? i asked that question just yesterday because i was on a prolonged zoom call with our african south african colleagues. and they said at least some of the rapid antigen tests would pick this up. he couldn t guarantee all of them would but the ones they were using, he didn t specifically say what they were, is that the mutations did not interfere with the ability to recognize the antigen by the antibodies that were used in the rapid test. so that is a good thing. the pcr tests that are used can pick it up. lucky for us that s the case. do you expect that the omicron variant will become the
Leeway, a little bit period of time of make a week or two to intensify your preparedness and to understand what s going on better. and that s the reason why the president said at the press conference today, now is the time to say, what can we do about this? the unvaccinated need to get vaccinated and those eligible to get boosted should get boosted because we know from experience, jake, that even with variants that are not specifically directed at by the vaccine, such as the delta variant. if you get the level of antibody high enough, the protection spills over to those other variants. so we have every reason to believe, even though this is an extraordinary, unusual variant because of the number of mutations, there s no reason to believe that it will not happen, that if you get the level of antibody high with the regular booster to the regular vaccine, that you re going to have at least some effect and hopefully a good effect on ability to
Covid conspiracy theory. he posted, here comes the mev, the midterm election variant. they need a reason to push unsolicited mail-in ballots. democrats will do anything to cheat during an election but we re not going to let them. congressman jack completely disregarding the first oath, first do no harm. the world health organization named it and labeled it a variant of concern, not democrats, and there s absolutely zero proof of widespread election fraud in vote by mail. let s discuss. ramesh, set aside the political nature of thirngs s, there s so about this variant we don t know. it s frustrating for health officials to say we don t know. they re trying to be transparent. it seems irresponsible for a doctor of note like dr. ronnie jackson to pretend this is a manufactured crisis.