I expect that existing immunity will continue to protect well against severe disease with Omicron, but I’m not going to start accepting claims made by public health officials without any data just because they validate my priors, so let’s just wait a little before celebrating.
https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1464622927333232640
If you’re wondering why I expect that immunity will continue to protect well against severe disease, you should read this post, where I argued that new variants were going to keep emerging but that they wouldn’t take us back to square one. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
The good news is that, if Omicron really is more transmissible than Delta (which it may be, though of course it’s not 6 times more transmissible), we should know very soon whether I was right. Unless I was actually wrong, in which case this is the bad news 😅
One thing I’ve come to appreciate since I wrote this post is that it’s not clear how much work T-cells can do on their own, so if Omicron really is as good as many people fear at preventing antibodies from binding (I have my doubts) and spreads widely, we’ll figure this out.
One reason I’m not convinced it will be as good at preventing antibodies from binding is that apparently the effects of mutations are not additive, so it’s difficult to predict how Omicron’s mutations in the Spike will affect neutralizing antibodies.
https://twitter.com/virusesimmunity/status/1416928763095486467
Moreover, even if it *is* as good as people fear at evading neutralizing antibodies because of those mutations, this may come at a cost in terms of how functional the virus is, because escaping antibodies isn’t everything: the Spike needs to still be able to do its job.
https://twitter.com/ENirenberg/status/1464599588036304900
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