The BA.2 variant of the Omicron coronavirus strain is no more severe than the original, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
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Based on a sample of people from various countries, "we are not seeing a difference in severity of BA.1 compared to BA.2," Maria Van Kerkhove, a senior WHO official, said in an online question and answer session.
"So this is a similar level of severity as it relates to risk of hospitalization. And this is really important, because in many countries they've had a substantial amount of circulation, both of BA.1 and BA.2," she said.
Van Kerkhove, who leads the technical side of the WHO's COVID-19 response team, was reporting the findings of a committee of experts tracking the evolution of the virus.
Their conclusions will come as a relief to countries such as Denmark, where the BA.2 variant of omicron has circulated widely.
The WHO said in a statement that initial data suggests the new BA.2 variant "appears inherently more transmissible than BA.1," and that further studies were ongoing to discover why.
"However the global circulation of all variants is reportedly declining," the WHO added.
The coronavirus has killed over 5.8 million people worldwide, according to an AFP tally compiled from official sources Tuesday.
Taking into account excess mortality linked to the virus, the WHO estimates the true death toll could be two to three times higher.
Also Tuesday, an analysis of US government data found COVID-19 vaccines were unlikely to trigger a rare inflammatory condition linked to coronavirus infection in children.
The condition, formally known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome, involves fever plus symptoms affecting at least two organs and often includes stomach pain, skin rash, or bloodshot eyes. It's a rare complication in kids who have had COVID-19 and very rarely affects adults. The condition often leads to hospitalization, but most patients recover.
First reported in the United Kingdom in early 2020, it is sometimes mistaken for Kawasaki disease, which can cause swelling and heart problems. Since February 2020, more than 6,800 cases have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As part of COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring, the CDC and US Food and Drug Administration added the condition to a list of several potential adverse events of special interest. A few cases reported in people with no detectable evidence of coronavirus infection prompted researchers at the CDC and elsewhere to undertake the new analysis, which was published Tuesday in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
The possibility that the vaccines could somehow prompt the condition is only theoretical and the analysis found no evidence that it did, said co-author Dr. Buddy Creech, a Vanderbilt University pediatric infectious disease specialist who is leading a study of Moderna shots in children.
"We don't know what the exact contribution of the vaccine to these illnesses is," Creech said. "Vaccine alone in absence of a preceding infection appears not to be a substantial trigger.''
The analysis involved surveillance data for the first nine months of COVID-19 vaccination in the US, from December 2020 through August 2021. During that time, the FDA authorized Pfizer's COVID-19 shots for ages 16 and up; expanded that in May to ages 12 through 15; and authorized Moderna and Johnson & Johnson shots for ages 18 and up.
More than 21 million people aged 12 to 20 received at least one vaccine dose during that time. Twenty-one of them developed the inflammatory condition afterward. All had received Pfizer shots, the analysis found. Fifteen of the 21 had laboratory evidence of a previous COVID-19 infection that could have triggered the condition.
The remaining six had no evidence of a previous infection, but the researchers said they could not conclude definitively that they had never had COVID-19 or some other infection that could have led to the inflammatory condition. Kids with COVID-19 often have no symptoms and many never get tested.
The results suggest that the inflammatory condition may occur after vaccination in one in 1 million children who have had COVID-19 and in one in 3 million who have no detectable evidence of previous COVID-19 infection.
Most kids who had COVID-19 do not develop the post-infection illness, but it is estimated to happen at a significantly higher rate than both of those post-vaccination figures. From April to June 2020, the rate was 200 cases per million in unvaccinated infected people aged 12-20 in the US.
"Their findings overall are quite reassuring," Dr. Mary Beth Son of Boston Children's Hospital wrote in a commentary accompanying the study.
Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatrician-scientist at New York University Langone Health, said the results show that chances are "super rare" for the shots to prompt an immune response that could lead to the inflammatory condition. By contrast, there's strong evidence that vaccination protects kids from getting COVID-19 as well as the condition, Ratner said.
Meanwhile, students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Sunday reported finding antisemitic fliers on campus seeking to tie the Jewish community to the coronavirus pandemic.
"This weekend has brought multiple reports of antisemitic and hateful fliers being dropped in different locations on and around campus inside plastic bags filled with small rocks. These messages are offensive, outrageous, and they represent unacceptable attacks on members of our Jewish community," the university's chancellor, Robert Jones, wrote in a statement to students, faculty, and staff.
He went on to say the fliers are "antithetical to our university values of inclusion and tolerance, and they are another disheartening example of the kind of antisemitic acts and expressions that are too common in our nation and right here in the community where we all live, learn, and work. Sneaking around and delivering hateful, hurtful, and racist messages in little plastic sandwich bags filled with gravel is a cowardly and craven way to spew hate and division in our community."
Rabbi Dovid Teichtel, director of Chabad Illini – Chabad Jewish Center for Jewish Life at the university, said in a letter to his community that was posted on Facebook: "I prefer to only discuss positive subjects, and it's with deep sadness that I write this post, but over the past 24 hours, tens of students have reached out to Illini Chabad for support and asked us to speak out, and I cannot ignore that request."
He continued, saying "fliers were strewn around … campus with hateful conspiracies blaming the Jewish community for COVID. This shallow and foolish theory is a product of the dark ages when such accusations were used to blame the Jewish community for the plague. We regret that such backward ideas have not been left on the ash-heap of history. … Such actions and displays of hate are not a reflection of our university or our campus culture.
"The Illini community is one of love, support, and mutual respect for one another," he wrote.
Also responding to the fliers was the Illini Hillel at Cohen Center for Jewish Life, which wrote on Facebook: "The fliers played on both centuries-old antisemitic tropes about Jewish power as well as modern manifestations of antisemitism in the form of conflation between Jewish and Israeli identity. It is outrageous to use the pandemic to spread the virus of hate."
"This latest attack only amplifies the need for increased awareness, education, and strong condemnation of antisemitism in all its forms," they continued.
Fliers blaming Jews for the coronavirus have been left in front of homes in Texas, Florida, California, Colorado, and elsewhere in recent months. Most recently, they were found in Colleyville, Texas, just weeks after a gunman held a rabbi and three congregants hostage there for nearly 11 hours on Jan. 15.
Noting that the university's student government was set this week to consider "bringing the antisemitic BDS movement" to the school, Tiechtel asked students to step up and oppose the measure against Israel.
He also urged Jewish students to follow the path of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson – by doing something to counteract the hate and spread goodness in the world.
"When we are faced with opposition and anti-Jewish sentiment, we cannot back down. It is a time to add in Jewish pride and to live more Jewishly," said the rabbi. "Show your Jewish pride and protect your home by adding a mezuzah to your door, putting on tefillin [phylacteries], lighting Shabbat candles, and doing an extra mitzvah."
JNS.org and i24NEWS contributed to this report.
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