UK study adds to evidence that vaccines don’t really work on Omicron, but a booster shot helps.

(Originally published Dec. 13 in “What in the World“) The United States has now lost 800,000 lives to Covid, with the 2021 death toll surpassing that in 2020, despite having had vaccines this year. And cases are surging anew as the Holidays approach. The global death toll now stands at more than 5.3 million.

A UK study has corroborated what doctors in South Africa and vaccine makers have already said: vaccines offer much less protection against the Omicron strain of Covid than against earlier versions, but a booster shot helps. While the earlier findings suggested that people freshly vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine Comirnaty would at least be unlikely to suffer severe infection, the British research found that vaccine protection against symptomatic infection fell to just 35% after four months. A booster, um, boosted that protection, but only up to 75%.

That suggests that the antibodies created by vaccines aren’t as good at recognizing Omicron and attacking it. It also confirms that vaccine antibodies fade by about 50% over about 5-6 months. The U.S. CDC already recommends boosters for vaccinated people after six months.

Some still insist on repeating the fallacy that the developed world is stockpiling boosters at the expense of developing nations getting their first doses delivered. Yes, there are enough vaccine doses to inoculate the world, but Omicron has demonstrated the urgency of getting boosters to the vaccinated. If not, their original inoculations (and the doses used in doing so) will go to waste. Also, a dose delivered to the developing world, as this newsletter has explained several times, is not equivalent to another person vaccinated. People in the developing world are just as prone to refuse vaccines as people in the developed world. And more importantly, most of these countries don’t have the means to deliver vaccines to the people who need them. This is a huge risk, in that these communities are where we can most likely expect new mutations like Omicron to emerge. But the answer is to work harder on getting doses into arms in those places faster so the world ends up inoculated simultaneously. And that’s a much more complex issue than just diverting booster shots from rich countries to poor ones.

As long as there are pockets of people infected, Covid will remain with us.