Our first preview of how vaccines will fare against omicron
The Atlantic, December 8, 2021
Omicron harbors more than 30 mutations in its spike protein, the primary target of most of the world’s COVID-19 shots. And it’s certainly dodging some of the antibodies that vaccines goad our bodies into producing—more so, it appears, than the variants that have come before it. But the variant isn’t stealthy enough to elude the gaze of all antibodies we throw its way. Which likely means that a decent degree of vaccine-induced protection, especially against severe disease, will probably be preserved. This is, in other words, “not great, but not the worst-case scenario either,” Vineet Menachery, a coronaviroloigst at the University of Texas Medical Branch, told science writer Katherine Wu. In a different story in The Atlantic, Menarchery commented on how people who catch the virus early in a wave may be disproportionately young and healthy. “They’re probably taking fewer precautions than an elderly person or someone who’s immunocompromised,” he said.