Israeli researchers announced that a three-shot course of the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech (PFE.N), (22UAy.DE), gave considerable protection against the novel Omicron strain on Saturday.  

The results were similar to those presented earlier this week by BioNTech and Pfizer, which were an early indication that booster doses may be necessary to guard against infection from the newly found variation. 

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The research, conducted by Sheba Medical Center and the Central Virology Laboratory of the Ministry of Health, compared the blood of 20 persons who had had two vaccine doses 5-6 months apart to the same number of patients who had received a booster a month apart.

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

“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 neutralisation ability against the Delta, about four times lower,” she said.

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Doron Netzer, head of community medicine at Clalit, told the Walla news site that the study showed “unequivocally that the booster vaccine is significantly associated with reducing the risk of mortality from coronavirus, including from the Delta strain.”

“Very few medical interventions can be attributed to a tenfold reduction in the risk of mortality, as we found for the booster vaccine,” he said.

The Israeli scientists said they worked with the real virus, whereas the corporations utilised a pseudo virus that was bio-engineered to have Omicron’s signature mutations. 

The Israeli discovery followed a South African investigation that demonstrated the Omicron version can partially evade two doses of protection. ​​The efficiency of two doses of the Pfizer vaccine declines in the face of the Omicron variation, according to preliminary study from a South African laboratory, although individuals who had two doses plus a previous infection were well protected. Because booster injections are not currently available in South Africa, no individuals in the trial had received three doses of the vaccine.