He's the chief scientific officer at Pfizer.
For example, I spoke with Mikael Dolsten. PALCA: Well, all the manufacturers are moving aggressively to deal with omicron. If we think the vaccines might not work as well, they would want to change them, right? How's that going? KELLY: Joe Palca, let me get you in here because that prompts the question of what vaccine manufacturers are going to do about it. So studies like this are why scientists believe that the vaccine efficacy will likely take a hit, yes. Is what he's saying, Michaeleen - is what he's saying that the antibodies triggered by vaccines won't work against omicron?ĭOUCLEFF: Yeah. Let me just see if I can put this in plain English. PAUL BIENIASZ: This polymutant spike protein was almost completely resistant to the neutralizing antibodies in those two sets of plasmas. He says they then took blood plasma from people who had been vaccinated or infected with COVID and checked to see if these people's antibodies could knock out this polymutant protein. Paul Bieniasz helped to lead this research. One group of scientists at The Rockefeller University even wondered what would happen if a virus had a bunch of these mutations all together, a bit like what we're seeing with omicron? So they put together about 20 mutations into the infamous spike protein. They found that many of them weaken the ability of antibodies to fight the virus. And over the past year, scientists have been intensely studying these mutations. Many of these mutations have shown up in other variants across the globe, just not all at once.
The short answer is while omicron is super new, its mutations, in many ways, aren't. But how would scientists know this so soon? - because researchers just discovered this in South Africa and Botswana a week ago.ĭOUCLEFF: That's a great question. But protection against severe disease and hospitalizations is likely to hold up.
That said, all the scientists I talked to agree that the efficacy of the vaccines will likely take a hit, probably a big hit, when it comes to stopping infections of omicron - so stopping mild or moderate cases. The populations are very different in terms of things such as age, vaccination and exposure rates. We don't know yet if omicron will spread in the U.S. What do we know?ĭOUCLEFF: First off, I want to be clear. We've been hearing a lot about the high number of mutations on this variant, which, of course, has implications for how effective vaccines may or may not be against it. Here to talk about what we do know are NPR science correspondents Joe Palca and Michaeleen Doucleff. KELLY: Lots of questions about just how big a problem this new variant will be and whether vaccines will hold up against it. But as the president's chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, told NPR today.ĪNTHONY FAUCI: It could be that it's here in such a very, very low level that it could be still at the point of it being a needle in a haystack. It has not been found in the United States yet. The worrisome omicron variant of the coronavirus has been turning up all over the world.
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