Covid19 : Pfizer provides less immunity to Omicron compared to other variants
Researchers in South Africa have found in an early study that Pfizer’s vaccine against the coronavirus disease Covid-19 actually provides less immunity to the Omicron variant than to other major versions of the virus.
Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa, found Omicron resulted in about a 40-fold reduction in levels of neutralising antibodies produced by people who had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech SE shot, compared with the strain detected in China almost two years ago.
A major British study into mixing Covid19 vaccines has found that people had a better immune response when they received a first dose of AstraZeneca NSE -0.62 % or Pfizer-BioNTech shots followed by Moderna nine weeks later, according to the results.
The emergence of Omicron has raised concerns that, based on the large number of mutations in the spike protein and elsewhere on the virus, this variant will have considerable escape from vaccine elicited immunity.
