What makes Ómicron’s BQ.1.1 subvariant four times more resistant to vaccines

France is the first country where Ómicron’s “granddaughter” already dominates 60% of new infections. They estimate that the same would soon happen in the US. The concern of the health authorities about this mutation that “better” evades bivalent formulations

Genomic surveillance reports on circulating variants of COVID-19 from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as European health authorities note with concern the progress of the new BQ.1.1 subvariant of Ómicron, popularly nicknamed “hound from hell”, which represents a third of COVID cases in the northern country, surpassing other versions of the virus.

In addition, as published by the prestigious scientist Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine and executive vice president of Scripps Research of the United States on his Twitter account, with a much higher application rate of boosters than in the North American country, France is the first country in which the BQ.1.1 variant becomes dominant and is present in more than 60% of new infections.

In the graphics from the Our World in Data site, which accompany his tweet, the scientist showed how the European country has a much higher percentage of the population than in the US that received its booster vaccine and, nevertheless, the curve of cases of COVID-19 is higher there than in the US, where the new subvariant dominates 35% of infections.

Omicron’s BQ.1.1 subvariant already dominates 60% of new cases in France

In this sense, a recent study carried out by researchers from the University of Texas and published this Tuesday in Nature Medicine revealed that the new subvariant -“granddaughter” of Ómicron as they also call it- is four times more resistant to vaccines, and is it is spreading very quickly. Scientists believe that the variant will soon be dominant precisely because of this quality of evading booster shots.

The researchers tested the new strain against new bivalent injections from Pfizer and Moderna, designed to target the original Omicron, to determine if the new variant spreads so fast because it can evade vaccines. And as they observed, the amount of antibodies (immune proteins that help fight viruses) produced in response to BQ.1.1 was four times less than those that prevented the earlier BA.5 strain.

For the work, the researchers collected data from 29 people who had received the booster and followed them for up to 94 days.

And while experts have emphasized more than once that antibodies are only a small part of a complex immune response, and believe the US has high levels of population immunity after repeated waves of COVID infection and previous vaccines , the study results are greeted as a blow to Pfizer and Moderna, who had hoped that their updated injections would provide high levels of protection for all future Ómicron strains.

Despite these increases, the number of Americans dying from COVID has declined in recent reports: an average of 287 people per day are dying from the disease, representing a 10% drop in the past 14 days.

The BQ.1.1 strain was first detected in the United States in September, but the CDC did not report it as a separate strain until October, the Daily Mail reported. Its predecessor, the BA.5 variant, was the dominant COVID mutation in that country in the late summer and early fall of the northern hemisphere, but its prevalence has since declined as the CDC began sequencing BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 separately.

Since the start of the pandemic, different variants have emerged periodically, with the dominant version of SARS-CoV-2 switching from the original Wuhan strain to the Delta variant in spring 2021, before Omicron emerged later that year.

Since then, Ómicron has outperformed all previous variants and subvariants in infections, prevalence, and dwell time. And for the moment the experts do not believe that another variant surpasses it.

The bivalent booster vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna first became available in the US in late August, but the vehemence that accompanied their launch from science has not been matched by the public: so far, only 40 million Americans have received the vaccine. additional injection, this equates to 13% of the eligible population.

And despite the fact that laboratory studies initially ensured that the new formulation could produce high levels of antibodies against Omicron, in practice, and in light of the data emerging from its use in the real world, everything indicates that they are not as effective as they are. believed.