COVID Omicron Variant May Have “Significant” Capability To Evade Vaccine Protection – Even From Third Dose

Vaccines and previous infection may provide Omicron with “stronger-than-base” protection, early study suggests.

However, tube samples from Omicron further suggest its “significant” ability to evade protection against previous infection and possibly even third vaccine dose.

Published today (December 11, 2021), one of the earliest, peer-reviewed studies of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 suggests that people who have been previously infected with COVID and vaccinated will have a “stronger-than-base” defense against these new ones. concern.

However, the test-tube (or ‘in vitro’, scientific) samples of Omicron examined in this new study show that it “surpasses” all other variants in its potential ability to evade the protection afforded by previous infection or vaccination. .

The findings, published in Emerging Microbes & Infection, also suggest that while a third-dose improvement strategy “may significantly boost immunity,” protection against Omicron may be “compromised” — but more research is needed to better understand this. to understand.

Lead author Youchun Wang, Senior Research Fellow of the National Institutes for Food and Drug Control in China, reports on this very early study and says their results support recent findings in South Africa highlighting that Omicron was “easy to evade immunity.”

“We found that the high number of mutations of the Omicron variant caused significant changes in neutralization susceptibility in people who already had COVID,” Wang says.

“However, the mean ED50 (level of protection) against Omicron is still higher than baseline, indicating that some protective effect can still be observed.”

Wang, former chairman of Medical Virology and Vice-chairman of Medical Microbiology and Immunology of the Chinese Medical Association, adds caution.

He says that because antibody protection — in the form of a previous infection or vaccination — gradually wanes over a six-month period, Omicron “maybe even better at escaping immunity.”

In addition, his team’s paper predicts that while “a third-dose enhancement strategy could significantly boost immunity,” “protection against Omicron could be compromised.”

The team of experts of 11 scientists looked at 28 serum samples from patients recovering from the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. They tested these against in vitro Omicron samples, as well as four other strains marked as “of interest” by the World Health Organization (such as Delta), and two variants marked “of interest.”

“This study verifies the enhanced immune escape of the Omicron variant, which is alarming the world and has important implications for public health planning and the development of matching strategies,” Wang summarizes.

Now, the team argues that more research, conducted not just in vitro but in real-world studies, is urgently needed to better understand Omicron. And in particular whether it can “escape the vaccine-induced immunity to cause more serious illness and death.”

“It needs to be reassessed whether the antibodies can still be effective against the Omicron variant,” the authors say.

“The exact impact on human protection may be influenced by more factors, such as the infectivity of the Omicron variant relative to other variants on human populations and the viral suitability of Omicron once the humans are infected.

“More population studies, including levels of immune protection and symptoms in people infected with Omicron, are needed to fully assess Omicron’s global impact on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The main caveat of this study is that it is in vitro in nature and it used pseudotyped (manufactured) viruses. However, previous studies have used in-virto as an established measure of “good correlation” and the current vaccine literature “established that the in vitro neutralization assays are good predictors of vaccine protection efficacy and vaccine effectiveness in the real world.”

Therefore, the authors state that their data “can well predict the potential reduction in vaccine protection against the novel Omicron variant.”

Reference: “The significant immune escape of pseudo-typed SARS-CoV-2 Variant Omicron” 11 Dec 2021, Emerging Microbes & Infections.
DOI: 10.1080/22221751.2021.2017757