In August, a team of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel began playing with the spike protein of the sars-coV-2 virus to see if they could predict future changes.
There were a variety of ways in which the spikeProtein could evolve. If all of these changes happened at the same time, it could cause a variant that was transmissible and could affect the effectiveness of the vaccines.
The findings were published in a paper, but little else was thought of. His fears have been realized three months later. The World Health Organization named the variant Omicron on Friday, after it emerged in South Africa in the last two weeks.
New variant are the norm. The variant has many more changes than expected. Immune evasion may be made more problematic by these mutations. It is not known if the variant will cause more severe disease.
Teams of virologists are racing to get their hands on Omicron's genetic sequence, and try to figure out what will happen next. The variant contains more than 30 changes to its spike protein, compared to the original strain, according to work done by a bioinformatician at two South African universities.
The most concerning of these are the changes that allow it to evade the immune system. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle has seen a hit on vaccine neutralisation by [Omicron] and I expect it to cause more of a hit than anything we have seen so far.
