Out of 72,832 cases confirmed on December 21, 20% are due to the Omicron variant. With 1,017 emergency room visits and an incidence rate of 544.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, the 5th wave is flooding France. But unfortunately ! the vaccine is not very effective.
We were waiting for him, he’s coming, he’s here. The famous Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 is spreading at high speed and causing more and more victims in France. Nearly 73,000 new cases on Tuesday including 20% of positive cases due to this variant discovered in mid-November 2021 in South Africa.
This variant, very contagious, “resists most monoclonal antibodies” recalls the Pasteur Institute in A press release, but it is “neutralized by the third dose”.
Three doses or nothing
The Pasteur Institute specifies that this variant “can be spread in people who have had two doses of the vaccine or who have been previously infected. Researchers from the Institut Pasteur and the Vaccine Research Institute, in collaboration with the KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium), the CHR of Orléans, the European Hospital Georges Pompidou (AP-HP), Inserm and the CNRS, studied the sensitivity of the Omicron variant to monoclonal antibodies used clinically to prevent severe forms of the disease in people at risk, as well as to antibodies present in the blood of people vaccinated or who have already been infected with SARS-CoV- 2. They compared this sensitivity with that of the Delta variant. Researchers have shown that Omicron is much less sensitive to neutralizing antibodies than Delta. The researchers then analyzed the blood of people who had received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine or the AstraZeneca vaccine. Five months after vaccination, the antibodies present in the blood are no longer able to neutralize Omicron. This loss of efficacy is also observed in people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the previous 12 months. A third booster dose with Pfizer vaccine, or the injection of one dose of vaccine in people with a previous infection, greatly increases antibody levels to a level sufficient to neutralize Omicron. Omicron is therefore particularly insensitive to anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies currently used in the clinic or obtained after two doses of vaccine. “
The study was pre-published on the website of bioRxiv December 16, 2021.
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