COVID-19 vaccines do not currently need to be changed to target the Omicron variant, the president’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday at a White House press briefing.
There is “no need for a variant-specific booster at this time,” Fauci said. Noting the “intense interest” in the ability of vaccines to neutralize Omicron, he cited new data that suggests boosters are 75% effective against severe disease. He also said the two-dose mRNA vaccine regimens of Pfizer and Moderna, while much less effective in fending off Omicron entirely, still provide considerable protection against hospitalization.
Health authorities and drugmakers around the world have been racing to assess the highly mutated variant’s impact on the protection offered by current vaccines, and to determine whether booster shots would need to be changed to protect against the new strain.
Early results from several recent studies testing antibodies from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against mock-ups engineered to look like the variant have found the vaccine’s protection could be sufficient to fend off Omicron, if combined with a booster shot.
One study funded by the National Institutes of Health from scientists in Massachusetts, which was released as a preprint that has yet to be peer-reviewed, suggested antibodies from fully vaccinated people who were boosted with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines may have a “potent” ability to neutralize Omicron variant.
Health authorities in Europe concluded earlier Wednesday that boosters “will increase protection” against Omicron, but they seem to favor accelerating boosters. They noted that the data support giving booster shots “as early as three months from completion of the primary vaccination.”
They warned that even if early results suggesting Omicron is milder than the Delta variant turn out to be accurate, its increased transmissibility could be enough to “outweigh any benefits of a potentially reduced severity.”
