Scientists around the world are racing to study the new African Omicron variant of the coronavirus and how dangerous it can be, especially to what extent it has the ability to evade immunity after vaccination or disease COVID-19 (so there is a risk of reinfection).
Although the picture remains unclear at present, the general assessment is that Full vaccination with two doses will continue to provide protection, but at a reduced level. (the extent of which is still unknown), compared to the risk of serious illness and death, which is why administering a booster third dose is even more necessary in order to protect more people.
Although Omicron is yet another – rather unexpected – obstacle to emerging from the pandemic, scientists believe it is unlikely that it will send us back to where we were a year ago, without the vaccines we now have. The more people who are fully vaccinated, and even better with a booster third dose, the more Omicron will encounter obstacles in its path.
Based on the data available so far, mainly from Africa, according to the New York Times and the Guardian, a mixed picture emerges for the new variant. Moderna's president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, said that Omicron includes a “Frankenstein mix of mutations” that raises concerns, but it will likely remain relatively vulnerable to vaccines.. If not, then the latter will need to be adjusted, which can happen quite quickly thanks to mRNA technology.
Although Omicron has many more mutations, there will always be areas of the new variant that are exposed to antibodies and T cells. On the other hand, Omicron is probably more transmissible and more capable—compared to Delta and previous variants—of evading the body's immune response, both due to vaccination and infection.. How effective it will be and whether there will actually be a need to adjust the current vaccines will take about two weeks to answer.
American evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle said that “in a few weeks, we will probably have a better idea of how quickly the new variant is spreading and how necessary it will be to develop a new vaccine variant. However, we can already be fairly certain that its mutations will cause a significant reduction in neutralizing antibodies.”.
Until then, what does this mean for someone who has been fully vaccinated with two doses? The professor of immunology at Cardiff University in the UK pointed out that, under the new circumstances, the extra protection provided by the third dose is a good idea. As he said, “if (due to Omicron) half or two-thirds or whatever percentage of the immune response is no longer effective and you are left with the remaining half, then the stronger that is, the better.”.
The third dose significantly increases antibodies, which will help against Omicron, although, according to immunologist Michel Nussenzweig of Rockefeller University in New York, this may not be enough to completely neutralize the new variant.
The picture looks better for those who have been fully vaccinated and then contracted Delta, or first contracted the virus and then received one dose of the vaccine, as this gave them “hybrid” immunity, which is superior, according to Nussenzweig.
“If you have had two doses of the vaccine and then become infected with Delta and recover, then you have acquired a very broad, very effective immune response, which probably covers quite well any variant one can think of,” said Professor David Matthews, a virologist at the University of Bristol in the UK.
The biggest concern is for those who have not been vaccinated. As Mathius said, “if it is true that Omicron is more transmissible than Delta, and it appears that this is the case, then what will happen is that it will accelerate the rate at which the virus ‘finds’ the unvaccinated and sends them to hospitals, which will increase pressure on the national health system. This could trigger a lockdown if hospitalizations exceed a certain threshold.”.
However, according to scientists, it remains unknown how exactly Omicron will ‘behave’ in a population with high vaccination coverage. Also, The question to be investigated is to what extent antiviral drugs will be able to effectively treat the new variant., but there is optimism that they will be sufficiently effective. The same is believed to be true for dexamethasone, which targets not the virus itself but the body's response to it, so the many mutations of the virus are not expected to affect its effectiveness.
