Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health in the United States, said there is no data yet that suggests the new Omicron CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus variant causes more serious illness than previous variants. “I do think [Omicron is] more contagious, when you look at how rapidly it spread through multiple districts in South Africa,” Collins, who previously suggested that a high-security lab in China may have received NIH funding to perform gain-of-function research on viruses, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. The United States is slated to impose a travel ban on eight southern African nations starting Nov. 29, while the European Union, Israel, the United Kingdom, and many other countries have done the same due to the spread of the variant—which was discovered in South Africa and Botswana. A top doctor with the South African Medical Association, who helped alert authorities to …