Our First Preview of How Vaccines Will Fare Against Omicron
And there it is, the first trickle of data to confirm it. In the eyes of vaccinated immune systems, Omicron looks like a big old weirdo—but also, a kind of familiar one. That’s the verdict served up by several preliminary studies and press releases out this week, describing how well antibodies, isolated from the blood of vaccinated people, recognize and sequester the new variant in a lab. The news is … well, pretty much the middling outcome that experts have been anticipating for weeks: a blunting of a certain type of immune protection, but not an obliteration.
Omicron harbors more than 30 mutations in its spike protein, the primary target of most of the world’s COVID-19 shots. And it’s certainly dodging some of the antibodies that vaccines goad our bodies into producing—more so, it appears, than the variants that have come before it. But the variant isn’t stealthy enough to elude the gaze of all antibodies we throw its way. Which likely means that a decent degree of vaccine-induced protection, especially against severe disease, will probably be preserved.
This is, in other words, “not great, but not the worst-case scenario either,” Vineet Menachery, a coronaviroloigst at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told me. Omicron’s likely to cause some degree of inoculation chaos in the coming months—more vaccinated and, even, get sick. But Omicron hasn’t rewound our immunological clocks to the beginning of the pandemic. Menachery and other experts remain hopeful that there’s a path forward. If immunity is, in part, a numbers game, then boosters—and the additional antibodies they coax out—may help , at least for a time. A from Pfizer this morning seems to point to this possibility, though the company has yet to release its data to the public.
