This is what you get when you keep vaccinating/hyper-targeting against wild-type spike protein only for a mutating virus.
It’s kind of amazing that we’ve figured how to take a reactionary approach (waiting until vaccine “failure” to start updating it) to what is normally a proactive policy (vaccination).
A vaccine targeting Delta probably wouldn't have fared better against Omicron. In fact, it could have been even worse.
While making a new variant-optimized vaccine is easy and takes about a week, and maybe they have already done it. But it still takes months to test it and to produce it at scale. One thing for sure, it wouldn't have been ready for the current wave.
I think one reason we don't have an omicron-specific vaccine underway is that we came out lucky with this variant. It is less deadly and vaccines are still effective against severe disease. If anything, the spread creates natural immunity. My guess is that the next big wave, which I hope will never happen, will not be Omicron but instead a new variant that escapes immunity offered by an Omicron pre-infection or vaccine.
I think people are now looking for a more generic anti-coronavirus vaccine, capable of protection against all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and possibly other coronaviruses like SARS. But it is not as simple as copy-pasting the genetic code of the spike protein like with current vaccines.
The reality is it isn’t ready for the current wave. It was easy enough to create, but the process of testing it and producing it at scale just haven’t been optimized. We should have been able to expect better from the $133 trillion global economic system.
Yes and no. We also knew that the mRNA vaccine’s neutralizing antibodies were something like 8x less effective against delta, but there was still enough left in the oomph budget to work. At least initially (at some point, your immune system wanes and that 8x less might become a bigger issue).
Moderna was working on a spike-specific booster toward the original South African variant (I guess because it’s spike protein was sufficiently different to worry), but I think it died off because delta took over.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/moderna-test-bo...
My issue is that the trend was looking unfavourable, but we did nothing about it except pray.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.13.21267668v...
Relevantly, it looked at omicron.
A few points:
> Third, we have not assessed the T cell immunity against the Omicron variant, which correlates with disease severity.
Non-antibody immune response is understudied. I suspect antibodies are just easy to measure, but, unfortunately for my academic record, there’s more to immune responses than just antibodies.
> Fourth, since all Coronavac recipients had an MN titer of <10 against the Omicron variant and the GMT against the ancestral virus is only 21.73, an accurate fold-reduction in neutralizing antibody titer cannot be determined.
Takeaway is that mRNA vaccines are very immunogenic in general. Hard to say if a more immunogenic coronavac would fare well against omicron or not.
Not saying there aren't potential deficiencies with this technology that was more or less completely untried until recently and still hasn't been evaluated long term, but if people insist on trying to make the wrong action work by doing lots of it, what's to expect.
I was hoping this would be about results from clinical trials using the updated sequences. That will be interesting, not least whether a broad cocktail can defend against all the major strains simultaneously.