Israeli researchers said on Saturday that a three-dose regimen of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19 provided significant protection against the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The research findings are similar to those presented by BioNTech and Pfizer earlier this week, which is an early indication that booster doses may play a critical role in protecting against the new variant infection.
The study, conducted by the Seba Medical Center and the Central Virology Laboratory of the Ministry of Health, compared the blood of 20 people who had received two doses of the vaccine 5-6 months earlier with the same number of people who had received a booster dose a month earlier.
“People who took the second dose five or six months ago do not have the ability to neutralize Omicron. While they do have some against the Delta executive,” Gili Regev-Yochai, director of the Seba Infectious Diseases Unit, told reporters.
“The good news is that with the booster dose it increases about 100 times. There is significant protection of the booster dose. It is lower than the neutralizing capacity against Delta, about four times lower,” he said.
The Israeli team said it had worked with the real virus, while the companies used a pseudovirus, as it is known, which was manufactured with industry to have the mutations that are characteristic of Omicron.
The Israeli investigation follows a study from South Africa which found that the Omicron variant may partially escape the protection offered by the two doses.
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