SHOTS, SHOTS AND MORE SHOTS:

While South African officials are unhappy with it, travel restrictions are the obvious first response. The U.K. government announced a temporary travel ban on several countries Thursday night. However, when a flight from Gauteng -- the South African province that includes Johannesburg -- arrived in London Friday, some 300 passengers were released into the wild with only an advisory message to self-isolate and take some tests. (For a government that has done a lot of complaining about lax French border controls, that counts as an own goal.)

Meanwhile, Israel put in new travel restrictions, quarantines and PCR testing at the border. The EU recommended an "emergency brake" on travel from South Africa. These restrictions merely buy a little time to map out the next steps. If scientists confirm that omicron can indeed escape the defenses of current vaccines, then the race is on to develop a better defensive weapon.

Pfizer Inc. says it can deliver a vaccine that would counter the new variant within 100 days of sequencing. That's fast. Regulators like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are likely to speed approval processes for vaccines that are just tweaked for new variants. Pfizer estimates it could make 4 billion doses in the first 12 months. Another 8 billion doses of the Moderna Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc vaccines are likely to be available in a similar time frame. [...]

Omicron was a statistical probability long before it actually turned up. With a 24% vaccination rate, it's hardly a surprise it first appeared in South Africa. The Hong Kong case was in a vaccinated traveler; the Belgian in an unvaccinated one. The longer it takes to vaccinate whole populations, the faster we'll cycle through the Greek alphabet with new variants; the only way to prevent that is to vaccine more people faster.

Wherever omicron is seeded, it's likely we'll need the now familiar range of detection and mitigation measures -- mask mandates in public places, more frequent testing and work-from-home guidance. While these measures are already back in place in much of Europe, it would be an unwelcome regression for the U.K., where mask-wearing is progressively rarer.

South Africa's transparency and the early response suggests we're at least learning the first lesson of pandemic management: that "wait and see" is a losing strategy.

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