A laboratory research has suggested that the Omicron variant can partially escape antibody immunity induced by the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
The research, led by Prof. Alex Sigal from the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa, has been submitted to medRxiv, a preprint server for health sciences.
It confirms predictions that a large number of mutations in the spike protein and elsewhere on the Omicron variant would translate into some evasion of the immune response induced by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Sigal said on Twitter that his lab tested blood from 12 people who had been vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and found that there was a 41-fold decrease in the ability of antibodies from the vaccine to neutralise the Omicron variant.
(Xinhua/NAN)