By Ivor Campbell

AMID all the ongoing media chatter about the Omicron variant and booster jabs, a little-read article in Nature recently carried important news about the future of the Covid trajectory.

Despite the self-congratulatory tone of the UK Government about the success of its vaccine rollout to date – and ambitious plans to provide everyone with a booster shot by early next year – those immunised against Covid are losing half of their defensive antibodies every 108 days or so.

As a result, people who received their first jab six months ago –offering, at best, 90% protection against mild infection – now have only around 70% immunity.

As it was also reported that uptake of booster shots among the UK population is proving sluggish, should we be concerned about a resurgence of cases, even if the worst fears about the virulence of the Omicron strain prove to be unfounded?

In many areas of our future lives, particularly travel, what will be as important as our testing negative will be our level of immunity, according to Brendan Farrell, CEO of Guilford-based Luas Diagnostics.

His company is the distributor of a US-manufactured test to determine a person’s level of Covid antibodies, post infection or vaccination.

He said: “That’s going to become increasingly important with vaccination roll-out. Those people who have had their vaccination completed are merrily going around feeling warm and fuzzy, but the reality is that up to 15% of people vaccinated will not be protected because they didn’t produce antibodies.

“And to take that further, with people who have produced antibodies, those antibodies can decline quite quickly.”

More concerning is his contention, supported by data from the REACT-2 Study of Antibody Prevalence in England, published by the University of Cambridge, that the AstraZeneca vaccine, used most widely in the UK, is less effective at producing antibodies, than either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccines.

Mr Farrell said: “Regretfully for the United Kingdom, the AstraZeneca is certainly less effective than the other vaccines. There’s no doubt about that.

“It’s definitely not as effective at all, so Boris and his fellow politicians were flying a very strong flag that they had done a great job in rolling out the vaccine programme, which they did, but their dependence on AstraZeneca is problematic because it definitely does not produce antibodies in the way the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do.”

He added: “The future for those people and, I don’t know if this will cause political controversy, is to get a booster shot, but not with AstraZeneca.

“It’s a British product and so there was a bit of flag flying nationalism, and that’s understandable, but the public discussion about the efficacy of vaccinations is only just beginning.

“The whole focus until now, and continues to be, let’s get everybody vaccinated. The next stage is going to be, ‘whoops, we’ve got everybody vaccinated but, do they have antibodies and are they protected?’”

Ivor Campbell is Managing Director of Stirlingshire-based Snedden Campbell, a search company for the medical technology industry.