Members-Only Article
Earlier I flagged two studies on Omicron vaccine evasion which were released last night. Now we have an additional study conducted under the auspices of PFIZER/BIONTECH which appear to show complementary results. I say ‘complementary’ because they test a different question but the results appear broadly consistent with those other two studies. I’m told that this study was done in the BioNtech labs and looked at a pseudo-virus version of Omicron against samples from people who received two doses and three doses.
The gist is that protection against Omicron goes down a lot if you’ve just had two doses. But with three doses it’s much higher. The key line is this: “According to the companies’ preliminary data, a third dose provides a similar level of neutralizing antibodies to Omicron as is observed after two doses against wild-type and other variants that emerged before Omicron.”