India’s Bharat Biotech said on January 12 a booster shot of the company’s Covaxin COVID-19 vaccine administered six months after the last of two doses neutralizes both the Omicron and Delta variants of the coronavirus.

Bethesda, Md.-based Revelar Biotherapeutics and Twist Bioscience from South San Francisco announced their bispecific antibody, RBT-0813, neutralizes both the Omicron and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 in studies with the live virus.

The Omicron variant was estimated to be 95.4% of the coronavirus strains circulating in the United States as of Jan. 1, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on January 4.

More evidence is emerging that the Omicron coronavirus variant is affecting the upper respiratory tract, causing milder symptoms than previous variants and resulting in a “decoupling” in some places between soaring case numbers and low death rates, a World Health Organization official said on January 4.

Comirnaty

The Omicron coronavirus variant is better at circumventing vaccinated peoples’ immunity than the Delta variant, according to a published Danish study, helping explain why Omicron is spreading more rapidly.

The risk of hospitalization with the Omicron variant of coronavirus is about one-third that of the Delta variant, according to British analysis of more than a million cases of both types in recent weeks.

The average number of daily confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States hit a record high of 258,312 over the past seven days, a Reuters tally showed on December 29, as U.S. officials weigh the impact of the more transmissible Omicron variant.

Research by South African scientists suggests that Omicron could displace the Delta variant of the coronavirus because infection with the new variant boosts immunity to the older one.

According to data from real-world studies from Scotland and England, the Omicron variant does not lead to as much hospitalization as Delta.

Getting a third dose of either Pfizer-BioNTech’s or Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine offers a “significant increase” in protection against the Omicron variant in elderly people, according to a Danish study published on December 22.