Study On Apes: No Special Omicron Booster Needed

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JAKARTA - Studies in monkeys against the COVID Moderna booster vaccine and the Omicron-specific booster showed no significant difference in protection, indicating an Omicron-specific booster may not be necessary.

This was conveyed by a team of researchers from the United States government on Friday, February 4.

The study involved monkeys who had been injected with the Moderna vaccine twice and received a booster at ninth month or a special vaccine for the Omicron variant.

The scientists tested various aspects of the animals' immune response and passed them the virus.

Researchers found both boosters resulted in a "comparable and significant increase in neutralizing antibody response" to all the worrying variants, including Omicron, according to the study posted on bioRxiv ahead of the peer review.

Both Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer have already started testing the Omicron-specific booster in human clinical trials.

"This is very, very good news," Daniel Douek, a vaccine researcher at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases who also led the study, said in a telephone conversation.

"That means we don't have to redesign the vaccine to make it an Omicron-only vaccine."

Douek says he believes the reason is that the original vaccine and the Omicron-specific vaccine have "cross-reaction," meaning they recognize many different variants.

The results are exactly the same as the Moderna booster testing study specifically for the Beta variant, said Dr. John Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College.

"Let's see what human data shows," said Moore. "Data on apes is generally quite predictive, but you're going to need human data."

One major advantage of studying monkeys is that scientists can boost immunity in the animals and then infect them with the virus and then measure the immune response, something that has not been possible in human trials, he said.