The value of vaccine booster doses to mitigate the global impact of the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant
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Abstract
Vaccines have played a central role in mitigating severe disease and death from COVID-19 in the past 12 months. However, efficacy wanes over time and this loss of protection is being compounded by the emergence of the Omicron variant. By fitting an immunological model to population-level vaccine effectiveness data, we estimate that neutralizing antibody titres for Omicron are reduced by 3.9-fold (95% CrI 2.9–5.5) compared to the Delta variant. Under this model, we predict that 90 days after boosting with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, efficacy against severe disease (admission to hospital) declines to 95.9% (95% CrI 95.4%–96.3%) against the Delta variant and 78.8% (95% CrI 75.0%–85.1%) against the Omicron variant. Integrating this immunological model within a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, we demonstrate that the size of the Omicron wave will depend on the degree of past exposure to infection across the population, with relatively small Omicron waves in countries that previously experienced a large Delta wave. We show that booster doses can have a major impact in mitigating the epidemic peak, although in many settings it remains possible that healthcare capacity could still be challenged. This is particularly the case in “zero-COVID” countries where there is little prior infection-induced immunity and therefore epidemic peaks will be higher. Where dose supply is limited, targeting boosters to the highest risk groups to ensure continued high protection in the face of waning immunity is of greater benefit than giving these doses as primary vaccination to younger age-groups. In many settings it is likely that health systems will be stretched, and it may therefore be necessary to maintain and/or reintroduce some level of NPIs to mitigate the worst impacts of the Omicron variant as it replaces the Delta variant.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.17.22269222: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.17.22269222: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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