AstraZeneca and Novavax say their shots protect Omicron

On Thursday, AstraZeneca said that a three-course dose of its Covid-19 The vaccine offered protection against the variant, citing data from a University of Oxford laboratory study.

The study, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, showed that antibody levels against Omicron after the booster were higher than antibodies in people who had been infected and recovered naturally. of Covid-19.

A few hours earlier, Novavax Inc had said that the first data had shown that its vaccine generated an immune response against Omicron. Use of Novovax’s two-dose protein vaccine was cleared this week by regulators at the European Union and the WHO.

It has yet to be approved by the United States.

Coronavirus infections have skyrocketed across much of the world as the highly infectious variant of Omicron has spread, triggering new brakes in many countries.

However, World Health Organization officials stressed that it was too early to draw definitive conclusions about its virulence.

First identified last month in southern Africa and Hong Kong, the variant quickly became dominant in Britain, where daily infections topped 1,000,000.

Preliminary data had indicated that Omicron was more resistant to vaccines that had been developed before its emergence.

But researchers say the increase in hospitalizations and deaths in Britain since Omicron’s implementation has been more gradual.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh who followed 22,205 patients infected with Omicron on Wednesday explained that the number of patients who needed to be hospitalized was 68% lower than they expected, based on the rate of patients with Delta.

Researchers at Imperial College London said they saw evidence over the past two weeks of a 40-45% reduction in the risk of hospitalization for Omicron compared to Delta.

UK hospitalization data was supported by a study released on Wednesday by the South African National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD).

However, researchers at NICD have included several warnings. “It is difficult to disentangle the relative contribution of the high levels of immunity of the previous population versus lower intrinsic virulence at the lower severity of disease observed,” they wrote.

WHO technical officer on Covid-19, Maria van Kerkhove, said the UN agency did not have enough data to draw firm conclusions.

The data on Omicron was still “messy,” she said at a briefing in Geneva on Wednesday.