'There may be more we need to do,' Trudeau says amid omicron concerns | CBC News

Incoming air travellers from all countries except the United States will be required to take COVID-19 tests when arriving in Canada, the federal government announced today.

WATCH | Health minister Jean-Yves Duclos on banning travellers from certain countries.

Incoming travellers from those 10 countries will have to quarantine in designated facilities, officials said.

Public health officials said the nations were singled out because of a higher than normal number of positive test results among travellers arriving from those countries.

The omicron variant has also now been detected across the globe — in countries including Canada, Israel and Hong Kong, among others.

Federal health officials say there are at least six cases of the variant in Canada so far.

"There will be, most likely, community transmission of the new variant at some point in Canada," Duclos said.

Duclos also announced today that the federal government has asked the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) to provide "quick guidance on whether we should revise national standards, national attitudes and actions on the use of boosters in Canada in the context of the new omicron variant.".

The omicron variant is notable because it has a large number of mutations, which may affect its transmissibility and the effect of COVID-19 vaccines.

While Moderna's leader is signalling concern about the effectiveness of vaccines against the omicron variant, the co-founder of BioNTech — the company that co-developed the Comirnaty vaccine with Pfizer — said today that while the new variant could lead to more infections, it's likely that fully vaccinated people will still be protected from severe illness.

While omicron may evade vaccine-induced antibodies, Sahin said that no variant has so far eluded that T-cell immune response.

Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist and researcher based at Toronto General Hospital, said Canadians shouldn't hang on every word coming from a vaccine company's CEO.

"I want to hear from the scientists doing the actual studies, what they think and what they're seeing," Bogoch said, adding there will be much more clarity about vaccine efficacy in the weeks ahead.

While conceding he's just speculating as laboratory studies continue, Bogoch said he thinks available vaccines will still prove useful in the fight against COVID-19.

"It would be extremely unusual for a variant to emerge that completely erases the protective immunity of vaccines," he said. "It might chip away at some of the effectiveness but it would be extremely unusual that our vaccines, and or vaccine programs, are now rendered useless.".

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called on Trudeau to take a position on waiving intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines so that more countries can produce vaccines like the Pfizer and Moderna locally.

And to do that, Canada has to take a role in pushing for a waiver of those vaccine patents," he said.