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COVID vaccinations spike in US as delta rages and omicron looms - Ars Technica
Dec 03, 2021 1 min, 19 secs
"Vaccines clearly remain our most important tool… If you were fully vaccinated before June, it's time for you to go get your booster.

The current vaccines are highly effective against the delta variant, which is still circulating at extremely high levels nationwide.

"But we should remember that 99.9 percent of cases in the country right now are from the delta variant," she said.

The highly mutated variant contains a number of changes known to thwart some neutralizing antibodies that would otherwise block the virus from causing infection and disease.

There are also plenty of non-neutralizing antibodies that will remain able to attack omicron, and those antibodies can recruit protective immune cells to help fight the virus.

Booster doses increase levels of both neutralizing antibodies and non-neutralizing antibodies, and the shots can increase the diversity of those antibodies as well.

Moreover, there are also potent cell-based immune responses, which do not rely on antibodies and are likely to remain effective against the dreaded variant.

"Although we haven't proven it yet, there's every reason to believe that if you get vaccinated and boosted that you would have at least some degree of cross-protection, very likely against severe disease, even against the omicron variant," top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said in the briefing.

Some early analyses from South Africa have estimated that the variant may spread more than twice as quickly as delta and be more than twice as likely to cause reinfection in people who had COVID-19 previously.

Since health officials first brought the variant to international attention last week, around 40 countries worldwide have reported cases of omicron.

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