In many parts of the world, the variant’s record-breaking wave is receding. Having a bespoke vaccine in 100 days would have been an unprecedented accomplishment, but Omicron was simply “too fast” for a cooked-to-order shot to beat it, says Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the World Health Organization.
This time, all things considered, we got lucky: Our original-recipe vaccines still work quite well against the variant, especially when they’re delivered as a trio of jabs.
But Omicron won’t be the last antibody-dodging variant that splinters off of the SARS-CoV-2 tree—which means the vaccines, too, will need to keep coming.
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Tough decisions are ahead about what triggers might prompt a whole new variant-specific vaccine campaign, and how we’ll manage the shift in time. That said, we don’t have to resign ourselves to a bleak future of infinite catch-up, with shots always lagging strains. Vaccine updates might not be that necessary that often, and when they are, we can poise ourselves to rapidly react. Rather than scrambling to sprint after SARS-CoV-2 every time it surprises us, we could watch the virus more closely, and use the intel we gather to act more deliberately.
