The race to test if vaccines hold up against Omicron

Today’s return of mandatory face masks in shops and other measures will “buy us time” as scientists assess the threat level of Omicron, Boris Johnson has said.

The prime minister promised that the latest restrictions, which also include travel restraints, will be reviewed in three weeks when the government hopes to have better information about the effectiveness of vaccines against the new Covid-19 variant.

In the meantime, he is extending the booster vaccine programme as scientists race to understand the effect of Omicron on disease severity and on natural and vaccine immunity.

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‘Evolutionary leap’

Omicron is thought to have evolved from an older strain of the virus known as B.1.1, which has now nearly disappeared, said The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). “It probably spent many months lurking in an immunocompromised person – maybe an HIV/AIDS patient – slowly racking up evolutionary advantages.”

When it was discovered in South Africa after a surge in Covid cases, scientists were “startled”, said Ben Spencer, science editor at The Sunday Times​​​. It had 50 mutations, including 30 on its spike protein, more than double that of the Delta variant. “This was not just a gradual shift, it was an evolutionary leap,” said Spencer.

The fear is that antibodies from the most common vaccines will not recognise the spike protein efficiently and “our hard-won immunity might be side-stepped”, he explained. Ten of the Omicron mutations were also on a section of the spike protein that attaches to human cells, and the theory is that these make it more transmissible. Delta only had two.

While the “genomics do not look good”, this is so far a theoretical risk, said Spencer.

Inside the labs

“Scientists have reacted more quickly to Omicron than to any other variant,” said The New York Times (NYT). They were quick to analyse samples in South Africa, where cases were rising, and alert the world to the new mutation. Since then they have been rushing to test vaccines against it.

“Dozens of teams worldwide – including researchers at Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – have joined the chase,” said the NYT.

Penny Moore, a virologist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa, “is perhaps the furthest along in testing”, said the newspaper. She and her team are “preparing to test blood from fully immunized people against a synthetic version of the Omicron variant”. They will also look at the immunity offered by another component of the immune system called T cells.

Another team at the Africa Health Research Institute is growing a live version of the variant to test.

Dr Stephen Hoge, Moderna’s president, has called Omicron “a Frankenstein mix of all of the greatest hits” and said “it just triggered every one of our alarm bells”. Both Moderna and Pfizer are preparing to reformulate their shots if necessary, potentially within three months.

The NYT said this would be a “miraculous feat”, although added that “the prospect of producing and distributing them raises daunting questions”.

The wait

Moore told Nature her team was “flying at warp speed”, but that results would take around two weeks.

The science journal said researchers are also studying whether Omicron “causes disease that is more severe or milder than that produced by other variants”.

Patients currently infected with Omicron will need “days or weeks” to determine how bad their disease becomes, said the WSJ.

In the UK, Health Secretary Sajid Javid vowed that new measures will not be kept in place for “a day longer than necessary” if Omicron turns out to be milder than expected.

As the wait continues Tom Whipple, science editor at The Times, said overreaction was preferable to underreaction: “Time and time again governments have learnt the hard way that if you wait for perfect data, by the time it arrives it is too late.”

But he added that it was “still perfectly plausible” that when the findings emerge “we might yet discover that the world has indeed overreacted and – happily – merely ended up looking a bit silly”.