New Israel study on Omikron gives hope: Booster vaccination offers "significant protection"

How is the situation developing around the new Corona mutation Omikron? Karl Lauterbach sees no reason to calm down. Now there is a new study from Israel. The news ticker.

Update from December 12, 2:29 p.m .: A booster vaccination with Biontech protects against Omikron. This is suggested by the first studies from Israel on the new Corona variant. Israeli researchers have found that triple vaccination with Biontech’s vaccine offers “significant protection” against the omicron variant, reports The Jerusalem Post (TJP). However, the neutralizing ability of the Biontech corona vaccine decreases compared to the Delta variant and is four times lower. The team at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv is nevertheless very optimistic.

A booster vaccination increased the protective effect against Omikron by about 100 times, said Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the infectious diseases department at Sheba Medical Center.

“It looks like with Omikron there is a chance that people could get infected with the booster but have a much lower chance of getting seriously infected,” said Regev Yochay. It is still unclear whether the effectiveness of the booster vaccination will also decrease over time; this is now being investigated by the researchers.

Video: lifelong boosting? Family doctor functionary expects the fourth corona vaccination to be necessary

As part of the Israeli study, the researchers examined the ability of the sera from 40 vaccinated health workers at Sheba. 20 of them had received a Biontech booster vaccination within the last month. The other 20 had only had two vaccinations, the last five or six months ago. It is important to emphasize that the neutralizing antibody study was carried out in the laboratory and is not based on real data. The study was submitted for peer review. At the beginning of December, Karl Lauterbach tweeted about data on the Omikron and Biontech from Israel *.

Researchers from all over the world are trying to find out how well a booster vaccination protects against omicrons. There is also a cluster study of seven Germans who were infected with Omikron in South Africa. Virologist Sandra Ciesek classifies the results.

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Less deadly, but more contagious? This is precisely why Omikron is a “danger” for Lauterbach

Update from December 11th, 8:20 p.m.: First research results of the Coronavirus variant Omikron indicate that the variant is more contagious, but not more deadly. Karl Lauterbach pointed out with a graphic that he shared on Twitter that this is anything but good news.

“Here you can see again in a model calculation, why Corona variants, which are much more contagious, kill significantly more people than more deadly ones that do not spread quickly,” he wrote.

But how exactly is the graphic to be understood? It is a model in which four different virus variants and their caused deaths are compared over time as examples. The variants are shown in four colors: gray, blue, red and green.

The graphic clearly shows that the red variant is the worst. The death toll is increasing much faster than the other variants. More contagious is therefore significantly worse than fatal, because the number of deaths does not increase as quickly with the blue variant. But it also becomes clear: less fatal and more contagious also causes many deaths within a very short time. This curve also suddenly rises extremely high. “A severe course kills linearly, high infection kills exponentially. That is where the danger from Omikron lies ”, Lauterbach sums it up.

Note: The graphic is just a mathematical model that compares contagion and lethality. It does not show the actual levels of contagion and lethality of the currently rampant coronavirus variants.

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Update from December 11th, 5:35 p.m.: Initial study results suggest that the vaccines developed so far – actually for other variants – do not protect against an omicron infection as well. However, many experts believe that it is wrong to doubt the vaccination and also to question boosters. Answers to important questions based on their assessments.

Omicron variant: how contagious is the coronavirus mutation? – Lauterbach concludes

First report from December 11th, 3:54 p.m .:

Munich – The new Coronavirus * mutation Omikron is still one of the determining topics. The data on the virus variant is still scarce. From Great Britain, where the corona situation seems to be worsening drastically, there are now two studies that come to (almost) the same result.

A preprint from England allows conclusions to be drawn about the infection and the protective effect of the corona vaccines. “This important UK study on Omikron shows for the first time more clearly how contagious the variant is,” wrote Federal Health Minister and epidemiologist Karl Lauterbach via Twitter.

581 symptomatic omicron cases were included in the study. As the authors wrote, the study results would show that the effectiveness of the vaccine against symptomatic diseases with the omicron variant is significantly lower than with the delta variant.

The results at a glance:

“An earlier booster vaccination seems sensible, probably necessary,” said Health Minister Lauterbach, commenting on the study results via Twitter.

Omikron: Booster protects between 70 and 75 percent against corona mutation

This was also the result of a report by the British Ministry of Health. People who would receive the booster vaccination are between 70 and 75 percent protected against the new Corona variant. This assumption is based on a study based on 131 omicron cases. The report of December 10th also stated: “First estimates of vaccine effectiveness (VE) against symptomatic infections find a significantly lower VE against omicron infection compared to delta infection.”

However, based on initial data, experts say that children will be more affected by the omicron than the delta variant. (mbr) * Merkur.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA