uk Britain to scrap compulsory COVID-19 vaccination for health care workers NHS “leaders have always been clear there are risks as well as benefits to mandating the COVID-19 vaccination for all health and social care staff,” . The Omicron variant is causing less severe illness and hospitalization than the earlier Delta variant. As a result, Mr. Javid said that it was “no longer proportionate to require vaccination as a condition of employment.”

ba2 Omicron subvariant BA.2 more infectious than ‘original’, Danish study finds - evades vaccine The BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant, which has quickly taken over in Denmark, is more transmissible than the more common BA.1 and more able to infect vaccinated people, a Danish study has found. The study, which analyzed coronavirus infections in more than 8,500 Danish households between December and January, found that people infected with the BA.2 subvariant were roughly 33 per cent more likely to infect others, compared with those infected with BA.1. Worldwide, the “original” BA.1 subvariant accounts for more than 98 per cent of Omicron cases, but its close cousin BA.2 has quickly become the dominant strain in Denmark, dethroning BA.1 in the second week of January. “We conclude that Omicron BA.2 is inherently substantially more transmissible than BA.1, and that it also possesses immune-evasive properties that further reduce the protective effect of vaccination against infection,” the study’s researchers said.