
© UnknownAntibody
Depressing reports appeared this week claiming that, to quote the
Telegraph headline, "Catching Omicron 'does not protect you against future infection'".
The claim is said to come from a new
study from Imperial College which analysed immune system responses (note: not actual reinfection rates) in vaccinated healthcare workers with varying infection histories. Note that
all the participants were triple-vaccinated, so no comparison is made with the unvaccinated.
Professor Danny Altmann, from Imperial's Department of Immunology, was downbeat in his assessment of the findings.
The message is a little bleak. Omicron and its variants are great at breakthrough, but bad at inducing immunity, thus we get reinfections ad nauseam, and a badly depleted workforce. Not only can it break through vaccine defences, it looks to leave very few of the hallmarks we'd expect on the immune system - it's more stealthy than previous variants and flies under the radar, so the immune system is unable to remember it.
According to the
Telegraph report,
Omicron infection does "virtually nothing against Omicron itself". They found that in people who were triple vaccinated and had no prior infection, an Omicron infection provided an immune boost against previous variants such as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and the original ancestral strain,
but virtually nothing against Omicron itself.People infected during the first wave of the pandemic and then again with Omicron also
lacked any immune boosting, an effect the researchers have termed
"hybrid immune damping".
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