WASHINGTON — A third shot of the Pfizer vaccine provides robust protection against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, the head of the pharmaceutical giant revealed Wednesday morning, adding to a growing — if yet early — sense that even if the new strain is more transmissible, it does not pose the high degree of danger some initially feared.
“Three doses against Omicron are almost equivalent to the two doses’ effectiveness we had against the original variant,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, said in a televised interview.
Bourla added that only two doses of the vaccine offer “significant reduction” in antibody response to the new version of the pathogen.