A team led by Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, examined plasma samples from 66 people with a mix of exposures to vaccines and variants. Some had received the bivalent booster distributed last fall, while others hadn’t, and each group included some people who had been recently infected by XBB.

The researchers made two key discoveries. The first is that everyone developed neutralizing antibodies against BA.2.86, and they were not any lower — and in fact were in most cases higher — than those generated against the already-circulating variants. In other words, the new variant does not seem to be as immune evasive as many had worried. “That was somewhat unexpected and welcome news,” Barouch says.

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“Two independent labs have basically shown that BA.2.86 essentially is not a further immune escape compared with current variants,” Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and leader of one of the labs, told CNN.

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Experiments testing versions of the virus in two U.S. independent laboratories suggest that is unlikely, said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, whose lab led one of the studies.

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As for Covid-19, “at the present time, we are seeing an uptick in infection rates as well as hospitalizations, however, the absolute rates of severe disease, hospitalizations, and death are still very low compared with where we were a year ago and two years ago,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who was not involved in developing either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines but previously helped study the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

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Dan Barouch is being honored by the King Faisal Foundation, based in Saudi Arabia. Read Article