Does prior immunity protect against omicron? These are the key lab results everyone is waiting for: How effective are the antibodies people already have at fighting off omicron?
If you got the booster shot, are you protected? Or if you had COVID-19 and then were vaccinated? The goal is to see how well antibodies from real people who have had COVID-19 or have been vaccinated against it can hold off omicron in petri dishes in the lab.
Scientists expect that antibodies from people exposed to other variants won’t work as well against omicron because of its mutations, but they need to measure how much less well and whether it’s still enough to stop the virus.