Israeli Researchers Discovered that Pfizer Booster Protects Against Omicron

Israeli researchers said on Saturday that their recent findings appear that the three-shot course of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine provided remarkable protection against the new COVID variant, Omicron.

The findings from the Israeli researchers were similar to those presented by BioNTech and Pfizer earlier in the week, the study mainly concludes that the early signal that booster shots could be key to protect against infection from the newly identified variant.


The study was carried out by Sheba Medical Center and the Health Ministry's Central Virology Laboratory, had a comparative study of the blood of 20 people who had received two vaccine doses 5-6 months earlier to the same number of individuals who had received a booster a month before.

Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at Sheba, told reporters that the People who received the second dose 5 or 6 months ago do not have any neutralization ability against the Omicron, while they do have some against the Delta (strain).

"The good news is that with the booster dose it increases about a hundred fold. There is a significant protection of the booster dose. It is lower than the neutralization ability against the Delta, about four times lower," she said.

The Israeli research team said they worked with the actual Omicron virus while the other companies used what is known as a pseudovirus, which was bio-engineered to have the hallmark mutations of Omicron.