The discovery of another Covid variant has raised new concerns about the ability of existing vaccines to protect against the mutating virus and whether they need to be updated.
That is because the new variant called omicron and labeled a variant of concern by the World Health Organization on Friday because of its high level of mutations, has only been spreading for a couple of weeks. It was first reported in southern Africa, where it showed signs of rapid transmission.
The variant has shown a greater ability than others in dodging prior immunity, either in those who had previously been infected by Covid, according to researchers in South Africa. Several countries, including the U.S., said it would restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries because of concerns over the omicron variant.
It remains to be seen whether omicron poses a greater risk of hospitalization or death for those who have been vaccinated. The data won't be available for another two weeks or so, said Jinal Bhiman, chief medical scientist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, the first country to report the new variant to the World Health Organization.
If existing vaccines don't offer the same level of protection against serious infections, that may spur vaccine makers to tweak their products, according to Bhiman.
Bhiman said that an increase would be a sign that we may have to come up with something new.
Several companies said Friday they are researching the new variant to see if it eludes immunity from their vaccines. The companies said that it would take several weeks to develop new batches to test against.
Moderna was testing existing boosters to see if they could be used against the omicron variant.
Pfizer, which developed a vaccine with BioNTech, said in a statement that if a vaccine-escape variant is discovered, the two companies will be able to develop and produce a custom vaccine in about 100 days.
Vaccine makers have been able to avoid doing that against previous variants, including the delta variant, which spread across the world this year and remains the predominant strain in the United States. Existing vaccines proved to be effective in protecting against serious infection by the delta variant.
That may turn out to be the case with the omicron variant.
David Kennedy, who studies the evolution of infectious diseases at Penn State University, said that it could be that we don't need to update the vaccines.
Kennedy said that the omicron variant has raised legitimate concerns based on a limited amount of data from South Africa and elsewhere. It's enough to make me think we should watch this and be concerned, but not enough to make me panic yet. Kennedy said that vaccinations weren't significantly undermined by evolving viruses. A key factor will be the data showing whether serious infections of vaccinated people increase significantly, he said.
Clinical epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, said it was smart to prepare for vaccine updates. If the world manages to contain the disease, those efforts are most effective.
It is possible that Pfizer might come up with a vaccine in three or four months and there is a new globally dominant variant by the time it becomes available, Gurdasani said. So, vaccine development and re-engineering have to go hand-in hand with efforts to contain transmission, and that is the only way we are going to get on top of the virus adaptation.