The newest omicron COVID-19 booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech do not increase neutralizing antibodies, proteins produced in the body that help prevent infection, against omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 compared to four of the original COVID-19 shots, according to a small-scale independent study.
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Michigan found that the omicron booster did not induce more antibodies among 21 people who had received three shots with the original formula and a fourth shot of Moderna’s or Pfizer-BioNTech’s omicron booster compared to 19 people who had received four shots targeting the original strain.
The study suggests that the omicron booster may not protect people from getting infected with the highly transmissible subvariant BA.5, which accounts for most COVID-19 cases in the U.S. currently, any more than the previous shots, despite the updated boosters being formulated to provide better protection against infection and severe disease against the current strains. --->READ MORE HEREUpdated Covid-19 vaccines boost protection, but may not beat original formula against BA.4 and BA.5, early studies suggest:
The updated Covid-19 booster shots appear to work about as well against the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants as the original boosters they replaced, according to two new studies from research teams at Harvard and Columbia universities.
The research suggests that our bodies have been well-trained to fight the original virus, which emerged from Wuhan, China, and that boosters mostly reinforce that response. Getting boosted this fall is still an important way to renew protection, even among people who were previously infected or vaccinated.
But the hope was that by tweaking the vaccine recipe to include currently circulating strains of the Omicron variant, it would help broaden immunity against those variants and perhaps offer better and longer-lasting protection.
When the researchers compared the immune responses of people who got a booster dose of the original shot to people who got the updated bivalent boosters, they looked about the same.
“We see essentially no difference” between the old boosters and the new about a month after the shot, said Dr. David Ho, professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia, whose team authored one of the studies. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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