COVID-19 variant Omicron & its lineages can break through immunisation: NCDC Director

As Covid-19 cases are on a surge in the country, with the Omicron variant and its sub-variants being dominant, Dr. Sujeet Singh the Director of National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has stated viruses like Omicron can break through immunisation.

In an interview Dr. Sujeet Singh said, "We have immunity status in the community due to vaccination coverage which started in 2021 and now have polulation who got immunized in 2021 and have decresed level antibodies due to vaccination."

"You have a varied spectrum of population with fully immunized to zero immunity people despite vaccinated.  Every Person has different level of immunity status depending on the variant of the virus they were infected with," he added.

"Gradually as immunity decreases and you have an variant like Omicron or its sub-lineages which have more tendencies to breakthrough your immunization, you'll get an increased susceptible pool of population. As susceptible pool increases, the cases will increase," he further explained.

Dr. Singh also said that, "According to the current data of genome sequencing,  we don't have any new variant of covid in our country. Most are all sublineages of Omicron. The most dominant right now is BA.2 in Delhi and other places too but we are also keenly monitoring other lineages too."

BA.4 and BA.5 viruses were more likely to evade antibodies: Research

According to new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the levels of neutralising antibodies that a prior infection or immunisations generate are significantly lower against the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants compared to the original coronavirus.

According to Dr Dan Barouch, the findings also indicate that these new Omicron subvariants will probably be able to trigger outbreaks of infections in people who have both natural BA1 and BA2 immunity and high vaccine immunity levels; "However, it is likely that vaccine immunity will still provide substantial protection against severe disease with BA4 and BA5," he added. 

The recently released findings reinforce separate studies conducted by researchers at Columbia University. They recently discovered that, as compared to other Omicron subvariants, the BA.4 and BA.5 viruses were more likely to evade antibodies from the blood of individuals who have taken a complete course of vaccination and booster shots. This increased the chance of vaccine-breaking COVID-19 infections.

Meanwhile, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control stated that BA.4 and BA.5 variants are spreading at a rapid pace and are likely to dominate COVID-19 transmission in the US, UK and the rest of Europe within the next few weeks.