Inside the race to test omicron's true threat

Microbiologist Milagros Sola processes coronavirus disease tests in a lab at Madigan Army Medical Center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, U.S. April 14, 2020. REUTERS/David RyderFILE - Six-year-old Eric Aviles receives the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine from pharmacist Sylvia Uong at a pediatric vaccine clinic for children ages 5 to 11 set up at Willard Intermediate School in Santa Ana, Calif., Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2021. In a statement Sunday, Nov.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. But the scientific community is focused, not freaked out - perhaps because it has seen this movie before: A new variant pops up, and everyone on the planet is desperate to know how bad it is. Science ensues.First, researchers will test how well the virus is equipped to dodge current vaccines. At the same time, they will watch closely what happens in the real world.

Matthew B. Frieman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, hopes samples of the virus will arrive in the next week so he can start experiments in lab dishes and vaccinated mice. Many people, including him, had shared the hope that as vaccine eligibility was expanded to younger children, it might be a last steppingstone before resuming more normal life.

"We're in a position of gathering data," said John Mascola, director of the National Institutes of Health's Vaccine Research Center. "The virus has proved to us that it has an uncanny ability to evolve rapidly, and it has the ability to change in a way that dramatically changes the variant that is predominant in the world.""We need about two more weeks" to see laboratory data and what the virus does on the ground, Mascola said.

Other labs are working on similar experiments with blood from vaccinated patients, including those who have received booster shots. A preprint study from South African scientists, for example, found evidence that people previously infected with the coronavirus may not have much of a shield against omicron, with reinfections three times likelier than during previous outbreaks. The paper did not shed light on how severe reinfections were or whether vaccinated people were more likely to experience breakthrough infections when exposed to omicron compared with their response to other variants.

"We are no longer a blank slate. We have preexisting immunity, even though it may not be perfectly matched," said Barney Graham, a key architect of the coronavirus vaccines, who recently retired from the National Institutes of Health.

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