In reality, the virus has mutated in a way that allows it to get around some of the frontlines of our immune defence system, our neutralising antibodies. The world has paid a lot of attention to neutralising antibodies over the past two years because they are easy to measure, and thus became a proxy for vaccine effectiveness.
But our immune response is far more nuanced than neutralising antibodies alone, particularly given how much of the population has been both vaccinated and infected with some earlier form of Omicron, says Jeremy Kamil, virologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport.
Vaccinated and previously infected people have other robust and still-intact lines of defence, such as memory T-cells and B-cells. People previously infected also have additional immune cells that reside in the respiratory tract.
“I’m not a fan of that word ‘escape’. I think a better word is ‘erosion’,” says Katelyn Jetelina, author of the popular newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. “This isn’t a binary that the vaccines will work or not work. In reality, it’s a spectrum of effectiveness.”
In the end, all of this means that the new variants popping up might mean we see more virus transmission – and more infections. But the shots still do a good job keeping people safe from severe infections, hospitalisations and death.
That important message could get lost in the mix of panicked headlines about variants. That’s particularly dangerous when enthusiasm for COVID-19 shots is so low – as of last week, only 14.8 million people in the US had received the updated bivalent shot.
That’s less than 7 per cent of the more than 226 million Americans who are eligible for the booster.
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