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I want to let you know that we have a paper out as accelerated article preview in Nature about how vaccination combined with #Omicron/BA.1 infection hybrid immunity enhanced the neutralizing immune response to other variants, including BA.2:

www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04830-x
This is an expanded analysis relative to the preprint, which didn't contain the BA.2 neutralization data. The bottom line: if you get infected despite being vaccinated, the vaccine is still working for you. It gives you an advantage in neutralizing other variants (old or new)
The smallest immunity gap is for Omicron BA.1 itself, which was the infecting variant. The gaps get progressively larger, and are 10-fold or higher for Beta, Delta and ancestral virus. However, people who were vaccinated and then Omicron BA.1 infected have better BA.2 immunity.
As we show in our more recent work, this also applies to the newer BA.4 and BA.5 lineages hitting South Africa now:

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.29.22274477v1
I think this result is positive: may mean protection from more severe disease in populations with high rates of vaccination+infection against new variants. I don't know what these multiple rounds of infection do to us in terms of long-covid. We may need to wait and see.
This was led by @KhadijaKhan24 and @farinakarim, with @KajalReedoy, @Zesuliwe_Jule, @mal12041, @YashiG24, @Sandile_Cele22, @gil_lustig, Yunus Moosa and Bernadett Gosnell, Anne von Gottberg at @nicd_sa, our friends at @CAPRISAOfficial, and of course @Tuliodna and @rjlessells
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