interview. and then, red flags raised a michigan sheriff revealing new details today about why the teenage suspect s parents were called to the principal s office just hours before the deadly high school shooting. welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper and we start with the health lead and the biden administration saying it is pulling out all the stops to accelerate our way out of this pandemic and slow the spread of omicron the new variant health officials still know so little about. new evidence today suggests, however, the new variant clearly is spreading in the u.s. president biden went to the national institutes of health this afternoon to announce his new plan launching a national campaign for boosters, setting up family vaccination sites, expanding covid testing, making the at home test kits free either reimbursed by insurance or provided by the government
can evade the immune protection offered by vaccines. the reality is we ve only known about this virus just over a week so we don t have the kind of data required to answer those questions definitively. reporter: scientists and pharmaceutical companies are working to get those answers i don t think the result will be that vaccines don t protect. i think the results could be, which we don t know yet, that the vaccines protect less. reporter: vaccine makers like pfizer and moderna stressing they are ready to respond quickly if changes to their vaccines are needed. we think within weeks to maybe two to three months we would be able to have an omicron specific vaccine booster available for testing and then for administration. reporter: until more is known about the new variant health officials say the best way to protect yourself is for the still unvaccinated to get vaccinated. and for those eligible for