very badly, but it was not deadly to many other segments of the global population. if you combined the deadliness that we had 20 years ago with the infectiousness that we ve had from covid, which is the kind of combination that these laboratory experiments seek to produce, you could have a future pandemic that actually threatens the entire species, which is why taking this possibility seriously is so important. and, just to be clear, you re saying this is the sort of thing they are working on right now in labs like this? this is the sort of thing they re working on. and i think we can stipulate, as your question earlier suggested, that there have been good-faith motivations for this kind of science. the concept, in principle, is create superviruses in labs so that you can then create vaccines and therapies to treat them if they were to emerge in nature. but the fact is people have been warning that this kind of lab work can create superviruses that escape because lab leaks happen.
understanding of the severity of omicron? is there a time frame? or is it a certain assessment after, say, a certain number of infections that we re able to look at? so here s the thing, joe. there are three main questions here around omicron. number one, is it more contagious. number two, does it affect people more severely in terms of hospitalizations or deaths. and number three, is it still going to be sensitive to the existing vaccines. interestingly, we ll know something about the vaccine relationship very shortly, i would say within another week or so, because we re doing laboratory experiments to see if the vaccines that are out there are still able to inhibit the growth in a laboratory of the omicron variant. the other issues in terms of how contagious is this omicron variant, i think it s probably going to be more contagious than the other variants that have been out there including delta. but i don t imagine, there s no
like ours or whether delta because it s been so successful will push it aside. that s another unknown. we should note a low vaccination rate country south africa here. if you follow questions on what you just said there, moderna s ceo one of the makers of the vaccine two to six weeks before we know if omicron reduces the efficacy of its vaccine. we ve heard from others, dr. fauci and others maybe in a week or two we ll have an indicator. are there any early signs about the effects on vaccine efficacy or is it just early to state and if so, how long will it take to know? there s two ways we ll figure this out. one is by laboratory experiments. to do that, you need to actually have an isolate of omicron growing in the lab and you mix that with serum from people who have been vaccinated and ask, does that vaccinated serum still neutralize the virus? that takes a while for the virus to be grown up. there s not a lot we can do to accelerate that.
mutations, 30 of them being in a key protein that we study and use to vaccinate against, which is the spike protein which sits on the virus surface. this spike protein engages our receptors and gains entry into our cells. it is also the target of the response following vaccination against natural infection so it really is a critical part of the virus and we are seeing a large number of changes occurring in this new variant. and of course now the race is on to try and find outjust how contagious it might be. how long will that take and whether or not it stands up to the vaccines that we have? it will take time. the laboratory experiments will probably take between three and four weeks and in the meantime, i think the knowledge from public health and research networks in south africa will give us real time information about what s going on. we are very lucky because actually the variant can be tracked by an anomaly in pcr testing that
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