Do the vaccines protect against the omicron variant? Lab study results are expected soon, but more research will also be needed.
“The laboratory data itself that we get in the next two weeks I don’t think will be sufficient to call for a,” Landau said. It’s his expectation that the variant will be somewhat more resistant to vaccine-induced antibodies, as it has a large number of mutations in the part of the virus that the antibodies bind to, called the receptor binding domain.
He also expects the antibodies produced by the vaccines to be less effective in binding to and neutralizing the omicron variant. But that’s not the only factor that needs to be considered; the beta variant, discovered in South Africa earlier this year, also led to a reduction in neutralization, he said. But because it wasn’t as transmissible as the delta variant, it never gained a foothold to spread widely.
Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, has been studying the outbreak of the omicron variant in real-time. According to early calculations using data from South Africa, he estimates it could be spreading three to five times faster than delta ever did. Still, these are early estimates, and researchers will have a much better sense after analyzing data from other parts of the world.
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