The omicron variant is dominant worldwide, prompting many nations to adapt their vaccine response
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“Bivalent” covid-19 vaccines based mostly on proteins from the preliminary SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in addition to the more moderen omicron variant could also be much less efficient than those who simply goal omicron, a research suggests.
The findings come not from a randomised trial, the most effective type of medical proof, however from finding out folks’s responses to pure infections.
Bivalent vaccines are being supplied in a number of nations, together with the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Within the US, nevertheless, the vaccines on supply are based mostly simply on the omicron variant.
The primary vaccines used through the covid-19 pandemic had been based mostly on the “spike” protein of the unique coronavirus pressure that began spreading worldwide in early 2020.
By the tip of 2021, nevertheless, the primary omicron variants arrived, shortly displacing the earlier ones. Omicron was so completely different that lots of people began getting contaminated by it regardless of being vaccinated towards the unique virus, though the vaccines nonetheless labored properly at lowering deaths and hospitalisations.
Around the globe, many individuals’s SARS-CoV-2 antibodies are subtly completely different as a result of they’re fine-tuned to the virus spike proteins they’ve encountered thus far, whether or not within the type of infections or vaccines.
There have been fears that folks’s antibodies could be so optimised to the unique model of the virus that it will restrict their immune response to omicron and future variants. It isn’t clear why this phenomenon – often known as immune imprinting – occurs, nevertheless it has been noticed with different viruses, reminiscent of flu.
Now, Yunlong Cao at Peking College in Beijing and his colleagues have proven that amongst folks in China, two pure exposures to omicron after a dose of an ancestral vaccine redirected their immune cells to make extra omicron-specific antibodies. This means we may mimic these pure exposures through omicron-only vaccines.
“This paper says very clearly there’s no must preserve the unique [protein] within the vaccine – it doesn’t hurt, nevertheless it doesn’t drive the immune response in direction of omicron,” says Georg Behrens at Hanover Medical Faculty in Germany. “If we wish to go additional in direction of omicron, you want an omicron-only vaccine.”
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