‘It will take two to four weeks to understand the severity of the Omicron variant’

At a high-level meeting organized by the World Health Organization’s International Standards and Reference Panel on Monday, scientists and regulators around the world discussed ways to determine whether the new version is immune to vaccines and how much it can protect an infected person. seriously affects. Senior scientists present in the meeting.

The meeting, which was attended by regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration, infectious disease experts from South Africa and the UK, shared the new edition’s limited findings. The African Institute of Health Research, led by virologist Alex Sigal, will run these studies to determine the different types of immune responses.

“It is too early to tell. We are multiplying the virus and will be ready to test convalescent plasma and vaccine samples in 10 days”, said Khadija Khan of AHRI (African Institute of Health Research) Mint In an email response.

Scientists try to determine whether a type survives an immune response, to determine how contagious a type is. This is done by culturing or growing the virus in a laboratory and comparing it to samples from infected individuals, those who have recovered from the infection, and those who have been vaccinated.

“Reports that say the new variant is “highly infectious” are speculative because we can only determine whether the virus is cultured in laboratories and we run neutralizing assays”, said the scientist, who due to the sensitivity Didn’t want to quote. Issue.

Then a study is done to measure antibodies to COVID-19 and compare it with a ‘control’ sample and samples from individuals who have been vaccinated. This will show whether a type is more contagious than its predecessor. This will take at least two weeks and maybe even more with a travel ban as the samples need to be taken from South Africa to the countries/labs that want to run these tests.

The above scientist said, “The basic understanding that exists about the variant at the moment is that it can replace Delta as the dominant strain, but there will not be much change in symptoms, treatment and prevention (ie vaccine effectiveness). ” Adding to that preliminary studies suggest that the variant leads to mild symptoms in younger people, that is, those under 50. “It remains to be seen how the variant may affect immunocompromised individuals”.

Despite increasing speculation and panic over new variants pharma companies working on diagnostics, treatments and vaccines have said their products will work against Omicron. BioNTech/Pfizer has said it will take 100 days to manufacturer the new batch of vaccines, with Moderna also saying it is ready to develop a variant-proof vaccine. The University of Oxford (which developed AstraZeneca) said there is no evidence yet that the newer versions are resistant.