COVID-19: GSK-Vir drug effective against Omicron, U.S. changes international travel rules

Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani details government officials' changes to international travel into the U.S. and the reported effectiveness of GSK-Vir's proposed drug on fighting the Omicron variant.

Video transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: All right, positive news on the omicron front-- new research out of GlaxoSmithKline shows its COVID-19 antibody treatment is effective against the full combination of mutations in the new variant. Yahoo Finance Senior Health Care Reporter Anjalee Khemlani is here with the details. Anjalee.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That's right, Brian. That's good news, because we've seen, of course, that some other companies have not been so successful with testing against omicron. But GSK and their partner VIR Biotechnologies is in the running for that. So that gives us at least one treatment, while, of course, we're waiting for those two other treatments down the pike, Merck being the first one with their oral pill, as well as Pfizer-- also waiting for word on that.

Neither of those two have been authorized just yet. We're still waiting on word for those. Meanwhile, of course, all of this spurring-- the focus on omicron spurring a lot of travel plans and changes.

The US government did respond to the increase of omicron cases by putting in new testing requirements. We saw that go into effect yesterday, where just as a reminder, everybody now incoming into the US has to have a negative COVID-19 test done one day prior to departure and coming into the US.

And that has changed significantly from a variation-- and this applies to everyone, broad strokes, US citizens, legal residents, anyone coming in, including those who have been fully vaccinated. So we'll see how all that pans out in the future. Back to you.