SA’s Beta breakthrough biologist goes one better with Omicron

Sandile Cele’s Christmas present to SA last year was a breakthrough that made him the first scientist to grow a live virus of Covid-19’s Beta variant within two months of its discovery.

Nearly a year after his December 25 2020 breakthrough, the microbiologist and biochemist from the Africa Health Research Institute in KwaZulu-Natal has gone one better this Christmas.

He has grown a live Omicron virus in just more than two weeks, and proved the Pfizer vaccine is still effective against it.

Cele’s achievement was praised on Friday by his boss at the institute, Prof Alex Sigal, who told a health department media briefing the laboratory technologist’s results are highly encouraging.

“There is no reason to conclude vaccination will not protect from severe disease with Omicron,” said Sigal.

“I genuinely feel there’s a lot of reason to be reassured that protection from severe disease is maintained.”

The institute’s experiments looked at the protection from Omicron in people previously infected with Covid-19 who had received two Pfizer shots.

“Protection from infection goes down by around three-quarters,” said Sigal.

“Protection from severe disease does go down but you retain protection of around 70%.

“The vaccine’s ability to elicit antibodies is definitely diminished with Omicron compared with the sequence the vaccine was designed for, however this effect is incomplete. The vaccine’s effectiveness doesn’t go down to levels we’d expect to be non-effective.

“We didn't see a qualitative difference with this variant. We saw a quantitative difference. You’ll get less protection, depending on how much antibody you have, which depends on when you were vaccinated and whether you were previously infected.”

Sigal said the Durban laboratory’s findings were supported by unverified data from Pfizer which arrived overnight.

“After two doses, they saw a strong decrease in the ability of the vaccine to neutralise Omicron compared to the virus the vaccine was designed against. But they also saw that if you get boosted you have very little decrease,” he said.

Pfizer booster shots are expected to be available early in 2022 for anyone who received their second jab six months earlier.

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