๐ข The study we all waited for by the brilliant team at the VRC/@NIAIDNews
Should we wait for an Omicron-specific booster?
Short answer: No ๐คฏ
Long answer: A thread ๐งต๐
The main question that many people contemplate is should I wait for an Omicron-specific booster or not?
Eight ๐ received ๐๐ of the regular (WT) Moderna vaccine.
Then, 41-weeks later, they were split into 2 arms:
1โฃGot a regular (WT) ๐ booster
2โฃGot an Omicron ๐ booster
2 weeks later, the team checked the neuts levels from each arm against various viral strains.
For ALL strains the neuts level of Arm2โฃ (Omi๐) were NOT better than Arm1โฃ (WT๐)
This was also true for Omicron ๐ณ. Look at gray lines at w#43 in both graphs (WT: solid; O: broken)
What we can learn from 20 waves ๐ of SARS-CoV-2?
A thread ๐งต 1/11
๐๐๐
The figure ๐ shows the strongest wave (โฌ๏ธgrey lines) in 20 countries around ๐ with the largest testing per capita. The peak is centered to be at day 0 and the cases are normalized to its height. Black: the averaged wave 2/11
We define a wave to start and finish with ยฝ of the cases in the peak. For instance, here is an example from Cyprus ๐จ๐พ. The peak (๐ด) at about 1100 daily cases per 1M. The wave's start & finish are labeled w/ an ๐งline at ~550 cases.
Gray: raw data
Blue: smoothed (our input)
3/11
@sigallab did a fantastic job in framing the Abs response to Omicron. But his manuscript actually makes make me a bit concerned and I don't find the results encouraging. Let's dive in a short thread ๐งต๐
Just a reminder, the Omicron and the Delta are highly diverged from each other compared to the ancestral strain, which serves as the basis for the vaccine.
@sigallab enrolled 15 individuals who were infected by Omicron. Four people were vaccinated with J&J, 3 people with Pfizer, 6 were not vaxxed, 2 had no Ab response and were excluded from the study. These 13people were followed for ~2weeks.