Is Omicron really so bad? What, Research has revealed till now

Abstract

The quantity and variety of neutralising epitopes targeted by polyclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 convalescent and vaccinated persons, as well as the genetic barrier to viral escape, are critical variables in neutralisation breadth. We show that human polyclonal antibodies target various neutralising epitopes, both inside and outside the receptor-binding domain, using HIV-1 pseudotypes and plasma selection studies with vesicular stomatitis virus/SARS-CoV-2 chimaeras5. Antibody targets correspond to spike sequences in wild SARS-CoV-2 populations that are rich in variation. The authors discovered that 20 naturally occurring mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are sufficient to generate pseudotypes with near-complete resistance to polyclonal neutralising antibodies generated by convalescent or mRNA vaccine recipients by combining variants of concern-associated and antibody-selected spike substitutions into a single polymutant spike protein. Plasma from people who had been infected and then underwent mRNA vaccination, on the other hand, neutralised pseudotypes with this more resistant SARS-CoV-2 polymutant spike, as well as other sarbecovirus spike proteins. As a result, adequately elicited human polyclonal antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 should be resistant to significant future SARS-CoV-2 mutation and may provide protection against future sarbecovirus pandemics