New Kovid variants have arrived. How worried should you be?

Obviously, this is a scary season for the Kovid variant.

Or not. These scare headlines and viral all-caps tweets are upside down. They mislead and mislead the public about the dangers of the new Omicron descendants. Worse, they potentially undermine an important message: COVID vaccines still provide good protection against all of these types.

Much of the recent flurry arose because the Centers for Disease Control updated its estimates of circulating variants, noting that two — BQ.1 and BQ.1.1., both descendants of the now-familiar BA.5 — Combined now accounts for about 11% of infections in the US. This is less than 1% from a month ago. Meanwhile, a variant called XBB is entering Asia.

The reason for the panicked headlines is that these new Omicron family members are able to “escape immunity”—a phrase that sounds pretty scary when taken out of context. It seems as if the virus has evolved from the tools we currently have available.

In fact, the virus has mutated in a way that allows it to get around our neutralizing antibodies, some of the front lines of our immune defense system. The world has paid a lot of attention over the past two years to neutralizing antibodies because they are easy to measure, and thus have become a proxy for vaccine effectiveness.

But our immune response is far more nuanced than neutralizing antibodies alone, says Jeremy Kamil, virologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, especially considering how much of the population is exposed to vaccination and Omicron. Some are chronically infected. , Vaccinated and already infected people have other strong and stable-intact lines of defense, such as memory T-cells and B-cells. People already infected have extra immune cells that live in the respiratory tract.

“I’m not a fan of that word ‘escape.’ I think a better word is ‘erosion,'” says Caitlin Jetelina, author of the popular newspaper Your Local Epidemiologist. “It’s not a binary as to whether vaccines will work. In fact, it’s a spectrum of effectiveness.”

In the end, all of this means that the emergence of new variants could mean that we see more virus transmission – and more infections. But the shots still work well at keeping people safe from serious infection, hospitalization, and death.

That important message may be lost in the mix of scathing headlines about the variant. This is especially alarming when enthusiasm for COVID shots is so low – as of last week, only 14.8 million people in the US received the updated bivalent shot. That’s less than 7% of the more than 226 million Americans who are eligible for a booster.

The other part of the story that is often overlooked is that these new Omicron variants can still be combined with Pfizer’s antiviral PaxLovid. The drug targets a part of the virus that has remained fairly stable even after the virus has changed, and has been shown to be effective in preventing severe cases of the disease – particularly in unvaccinated and older populations.

However, there is reason to be concerned about the BQ1, BQ1.1 and XBB. These new variants threaten to disarm two previous effective monoclonal antibody therapies, AstraZeneca’s Evushield (used to prevent infection) and Lilly’s bebetalovimab (used to treat infections). Medicines have been an important tool to protect immunocompromised people and others at high risk of serious disease. Companies are working on updated antibodies and the Food and Drug Administration should continue to speed them through emergency use authorizations (and Congress can ensure that companies continue to develop and manufacture these drugs by allocating more COVID funding). encouraged to keep).

So when do we worry? Those alarming headlines may be justified if an entirely new branch emerges in the SARS-CoV-2 family tree—one that combines the lethality of delta or beta variants with the transmissibility of Omicron. “It’s almost as unlikely to be a scenario where more Omicron-like variants keep coming out, but given this virus has taken over,” says Zetlina, “we have to be humble.”

And in the meantime, Kamil says that if you’re someone who hasn’t had a COVID or booster shot in the past six months, now would be a good time to get one. Depending on what other countries are already seeing, a winter wave driven by one or more of these forms is likely to follow. But it will only result in another wave of death if we stop relying on our still good defense.

,This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the biotech, health care and pharmaceutical industries. Prior to this, she was the executive editor of Chemical and Engineering News.