Every country will be infected with the Covid-19 Omicron variant, expert virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday, advising people to wash their hands regularly, always wear a mask, keep a distance from others and get vaccinated.
Yong said Omicron can spread more easily than other variants including Delta. He speculated that it would replace Delta soon once it spreads worldwide.
Meanwhile, another virologist, Anan Jongkaewwattana, wrote on his Facebook page that Hong Kong researchers, who conducted tests with bronchial and lung tissue samples, found that Omicron grows faster in the upper bronchus.
However, the virus grew slower in the lungs, which supported reports that Omicron will not be as severe as other variants.
The omicron variant dented the protection afforded by two doses of Pfizers and AstraZenecas covid vaccines as feared, researchers found, increasing the risk of infection.
Blood samples collected from people vaccinated with the two different shots and tested against the new strain showed a substantial drop in neutralizing antibodies, a proxy for protection, particularly compared with the delta variant, researchers from the University of Oxford said Monday in a paper.
The results echo other recent findings that emphasize the need for booster shots, especially amid evidence of omicron’s ability to drive a tidal wave of infections. The scientists couldn’t yet answer another key question, about the vaccines’ ability to ward off severe disease. The new mutation has sparked concern around the globe, but reports from South Africa — where it was first discovered — suggest so far cases appear to be milder than during earlier surges.
Omicron’s impact should become better documented in a few more weeks, making clear whether new vaccines are needed, according to Teresa Lambe, one of the creators of the shot that Astra developed with Oxford.
“We’re hopeful that the current vaccine will protect against severe disease and hospitalization and that’s certainly what we’ve seen before with other variants of concern,” Lambe told reporters. “We and other vaccine manufacturers are in a position that if a new variant vaccine is needed, we can go fast.”
In the meantime, the rise in infections alone could strain hospitals in places like the U.K. Gavin Screaton, head of Oxford’s medical-sciences division and lead author of the paper, called for remaining “cautious, as greater case numbers will still place a considerable burden on health-care systems.”
The researchers saw a roughly 30-fold drop in neutralizing antibodies against omicron after two doses of the Pfizer vaccine compared with the delta strain. The impact on the Astra shot was similar. The authors also found evidence of some participants failing to neutralize the virus at all.
Neutralizing antibodies are just one arm of the immune system’s defence, and the scientists are now looking at how T cells respond to the variant, with data expected in the coming weeks.
The blood samples were taken from the Oxford-led Com-Cov2 study looking at how mixing and matching vaccines with different intervals impacts the immune response to covid-19. The findings on omicron were mainly based on those volunteers that had two shots of the same vaccine, the researchers said at a press briefing Monday.
The data was published on the pre-print server medRxiv and has been submitted for peer review.
A third vaccination drive is necessary to deal with the Omicron Covid-19 variant, expert virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
Comparing the battle against Covid-19 to a long marathon, Dr Yong said people should be given inactivated vaccines like Sinopharm or Sinovac for their first two jabs as they have few side effects.
However, he said, all three jabs of a viral-vector vaccine like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson is not suitable because recipients’ immunity drops over a short period.
He added that though mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna provide high immunity, they also have high side effects.
“Swollen lymph nodes were found in some people who received an mRNA vaccine as their third jab, while heart muscle inflammation was found in some whose second shot was an mRNA vaccine,” he said.
Dr Yong said boosters can be provided in the following combinations:
• Two jabs of inactivated vaccine: The third jab can be a viral-vector or mRNA vaccine and delivered one month after the second jab. Both viral-vector and mRNA vaccines can be delivered as fourth shots to deal with new Covid-19 variants.
• Inactivated and viral-vector cocktail: A booster of a viral-vector or mRNA vaccine can be administered three months after the second jab. If the third jab is a viral-vector vaccine, then the fourth jab should be an mRNA one.
• Two viral-vector jabs: The third jab should be an mRNA vaccine administered three to six months after the second jab. If people prefer a viral-vector booster, then the interval must be longer than six months to ensure high immunity.
• Two mRNA jabs: The third jab can be an mRNA vaccine depending on the Covid-19 situation.
Expert virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan offered advice on tackling the Omicron variant in a Facebook post on Saturday.
He said initial studies show that Omicron is easily transmissible and that vaccines do not provide enough protection. This means even fully vaccinated people will need to build more immunity to fight against the variant even if they have mild or no symptoms, he said.
He said the only way people can build their immunity is if they get at least two jabs of the Covid-19 vaccine and a booster shot three months later.
Dr Yong also said that the government and the private sector have enough vaccine doses for citizens who need their jabs.
The Food and Drug Administration will also authorise vaccines for young children as soon as possible.
The virologist said people who have developed an immunity to Covid-19 or have been double jabbed will likely have very mild or no symptoms if infected by Omicron, adding that the virus will eventually become a regular respiratory infection.
The Omicron variant will create natural herd immunity in one or two months if it is not severe, Vichaiyut Hospital respiratory specialist Dr Manoon Leechawengwongs wrote on his Facebook page.
The post said the variant has now spread to more than 50 countries in one month. Thailand has already found three Omicron cases.
Omicron can spread twice as quickly as the Delta variant and two doses of current vaccinations are unlikely to provide immunity against it.
However, the latest Covid-19 variant is thought to be less severe than Delta, according to available information from Africa. African patients have shown few symptoms such as a cold, sore throat, runny nose, coughing, sneezing, tiredness, headache and body ache. And there have been no reports so far of Omicron causing any deaths.
Manoon expects the variant to spread rapidly worldwide in two or three months. It will be good news if it is not severe, he wrote, adding that it will then create herd immunity and make Covid-19 become endemic.
Manoon said Thais should not worry about Omicron too much. But he urged people to be cautious by wearing masks, keeping a distance from others, washing hands, avoiding closed or crowded places, and getting fully vaccinated.
The Covid-19 Omicron variant may likely be less severe than Delta, expert virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday.
Yong pointed out that the Delta variant was found in 99 per cent of cases across the globe.
He also said the world was now seeing the seasonal H1N1 flu before the 2009 H1N1 flu spread.
Yong said the Delta variant would of course be replaced by Omicron if the latter spreads more easily.
Outside Africa, about half of the total patients in the UK, Norway and Denmark have shown no symptoms, while the other half have seen a small number of symptoms when compared to the Delta variant, he wrote.
Meanwhile, the number of Omicron patients requiring hospitalisation in southern Africa is so far less than the Delta variant.
Yong also said it would be good news if Omicron was “truly not severe”. If the disease is not severe and spreads to a large number of people, it will create herd immunity. The need for vaccines will be reduced, especially for people who have been infected before, and vaccine buyers will have the upper hand.
Present information about the severity of Omicron might take some time to prove, he added.
One year ago, a grandmother named Margaret Keenan, then 90 years old, rolled up her sleeve at University Hospital Coventry in the English midlands to take her place in history.
Keenan became the first person in the world to receive Pfizer’s Covid vaccine outside a clinical trial. It was a turning point in the pandemic, raising hopes that there was a path out of the crisis, along with questions about how well the rapidly-created shots would perform.
Now, after 8 billion doses, the impact is clear. The vaccines – not just from Pfizer but also Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and others – have slashed hospitalizations and deaths in countries where they’ve been rolled out widely. In Europe alone, research shows they’ve saved about half a million lives among people age 60 and over.
But they haven’t vanquished the virus. Cases have quadrupled in the past year, vast parts of the globe haven’t gained access to vaccines and concerning variants keep emerging, bringing new waves of infections, the return of lockdowns and restrictions on travel.
And now, two years into the pandemic, there is omicron, a heavily mutated variant that emerged in recent weeks. It’s put the world on edge, leaving everyone desperately waiting for information on the severity of the strain and how well vaccines will work against it.
“Vaccines are a major miracle of modern science,” said Sarah Pitt, a virologist at the University of Brighton in England. But some governments “decided they were going to vaccinate their way out of the pandemic. What we’ll do is vaccinate everybody, and it will all be fine. Of course, that was never going to work.”
The first Pfizer shot in the U.S. came a week after Keenan, on Dec. 14, 2020. China had started doling out its own vaccines in the summer of 2020 under an emergency use authorization.
Since Keenan’s moment, many developed nations, including the U.K., have immunized the majority of their populations.
But the rollout over the past year hasn’t been smooth, partly due to delivery snags and very rare but potentially serious side effects that have fueled hesitancy in some quarters. Scientists also worry that vaccine disparities will breed more dangerous strains that pose a risk to all nations.
The Covid-19 shots, developed in record time, are remarkable achievements. Yet they aren’t 100% effective, and some people who are protected can still become infected and transmit the illness to others.
Those cases appear to be more frequent with the delta variant surging and immunity waning in people who were vaccinated months ago. In Europe, the latest surge in infections has put Austria back in lockdown, while Germany may be about to make vaccines compulsory.
Scientists are now racing to update the current shots to combat omicron if necessary, and some are aiming to target multiple variants in one shot. Omicron’s mutations suggest that it is likely to evade the protection of vaccines to at least some extent, but there is also some very tentative evidence that it won’t cause more severe illness than previous versions of the virus. Answers to some of those key questions are expected in the coming days.
With studies showing that vaccine effectiveness wanes over time, governments are accelerating booster campaigns. Pills from Merck and Pfizer are on the way, adding to the arsenal against the virus.
Given that vaccines aren’t a silver bullet, some health experts say that, rather than counting so heavily on shots, governments should have maintained other measures, from masks to testing, for longer.
“We’re so fortunate to have vaccines,” said David Heymann, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and former World Health Organization official. “In the U.K. and many countries with high vaccination levels, public health leaders believe, and I think they’re probably right, that they’ve been able to de-link serious illness from infection because of vaccines. But they haven’t been able to prevent infection with this generation of vaccines.”
Inequality has also been an issue in the drive to inoculate populations. Instead of vaccines being distributed evenly, rich countries raced ahead, creating a glaring gap in access. Health advocates have pushed to expand shipments, technology and production capacity.
Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO’s director-general, says more affluent countries should focus on helping lower-income nations that are struggling with a “toxic mix” of low vaccination levels, weak testing, fragile health systems and other factors. Otherwise, the virus will continue to have places to take hold and adapt.
“You are playing with fire” if you don’t keep pressure on the virus in all parts of the world, he said. “This virus will mutate, and if any of those mutations are favorable to transmission, they will emerge and they will dominate, and then you run into potential problems.”
But richer countries may be even more inclined to hoard shots now, given the recent surge in cases in Europe and elsewhere, and the fresh omicron threat.
In the U.S., the variant is prompting concerns about capacity in already-strained health-systems. Almost four out of five intensive care beds across the country are currently occupied, with Covid patients accounting for a significant proportion.
China, whose shots are less effective than the messenger RNA shots used in the West, marked the astonishing milestone of having 1 billion people fully vaccinated in September. Yet despite high coverage, its borders remain tightly sealed and Beijing continues to meet flareups with the same pre-vaccine playbook of strict lockdowns and mass testing to stamp out every infection.
Britain, the first country in the western world to approve and deploy Covid vaccines, is recording more than 50,000 cases a day, moving closer to a 2021 high.
“The good news is that these vaccines have overperformed relative to what we expected,” said Michael Kinch, a vaccine specialist at Washington University in St. Louis. But “we need to try to try to stay one step ahead of this thing, and there we’ve taken our eye off the prize.”
The worry now is that omicron makes that even harder, and that the effectiveness of vaccines gradually declines over time in the face of new variants.
“Whether we like it or not, this is here to stay,” he said.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, expert virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan answered some key questions about the Omicron Covid-19 variant.
He said Omicron has mutated far more than other variants of the virus, and the key questions that require answers are:
• Is Omicron more infectious?
After Omicron was detected in South Africa late last month, it has spread to almost 50 countries, including Thailand. This proves that Omicron is twice as infectious as the Delta variant and will replace it in the future.
• Can Omicron skip the immunity provided by a previous infection or vaccine?
Some Omicron patients were fully vaccinated or had recovered from a Covid-19 infection. Obviously, they are not immune to Omicron, but since most of them developed little or no symptoms, the vaccines are clearly very effective at protecting against severe symptoms or death.
• How severe is the Omicron variant?
More than 1,000 patients outside Africa have developed little or no symptoms. In Africa, almost half of the patients showed no symptoms, while the rest showed few symptoms. However, this is just the beginning phase of the variant, so symptoms may worsen in the future. Though it will take two weeks before things become clearer, the likelihood is that this variant will cause less severe symptoms.
In summary, Yong said though this disease is highly transmissible, and may partially skip immunity, people who have been double jabbed or previously infected may develop few or no symptoms.
He said this virus will eventually develop into a seasonal respiratory disease and only affect those with little or no immunity.
There is low to very low risk of Thailand’s first Omicron case infecting others as the cycle threshold in the RT-PCR test is very high, Dr Anan Jongkaewwatana from the National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology said in a Facebook post on Monday.
He made this remark after the Public Health Ministry announced that the country’s first Omicron infection was detected in a foreigner who had arrived from Spain on November 30.
Anan said the patient did not develop any symptoms possibly because he had taken the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.
“If the patient wears a face mask at all times, then I believe this discovery is not worrisome,” he said.
However, Anan has advised the authorities to strictly screen all tourists, not just those arriving from Africa.
Covid-19 will become a seasonal disease once everybody has developed an immunity against the virus, expert virologist Dr Yong Poovorawan said in a Facebook post on Monday.
He said about 1,000 Covid-19 patients with mild symptoms and zero or deaths in single digits can be expected as it is not possible to completely eliminate the virus.
For instance, he said, influenza claims approximately 200 lives in Thailand every year, especially among patients with underlying diseases, the elderly, children, obese people and pregnant women.
Dr Yong added that children are given the flu vaccine and booster shots yearly to cut down on deaths.
“In the future, when everybody has developed an immunity to Covid-19, it will become a normal viral infection like influenza, which infects people during the rainy season from June to September and the cool season from January to March,” he said.
The Chulalongkorn University expert also advised people to get their Covid-19 shots as it is more beneficial than getting infected by the virus.
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