--- title: What to Know About BA.2, a New Omicron Variant description: BA.2, an Omicron variant, is spreading around the world. Some studies suggest it may be more transmissible and severe than Omicron. canonical: https://time.com/6143069/new-omicron-variant-ba2/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-28T16:00:14.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-11T23:59:00.000Z article:section: Health og:title: What to Know About BA.2, a New Omicron Variant og:description: BA.2, an Omicron variant, is spreading around the world. Some studies suggest it may be more transmissible and severe than Omicron. og:url: https://time.com/6143069/new-omicron-variant-ba2/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9274f68e00916213/698a21ec096a949f686ac315/GettyImages-1230712116.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: FRANCE-HEALTH-VIRUS-RESEARCH og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What to Know About BA.2, a New Omicron Variant twitter:description: BA.2, an Omicron variant, is spreading around the world. Some studies suggest it may be more transmissible and severe than Omicron. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9274f68e00916213/698a21ec096a949f686ac315/GettyImages-1230712116.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # What to Know About BA.2, a New Omicron Variant > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=d3ec517f-fcd5-489c-a1e1-c1e448947f54&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine [Watch (HLS stream): The Miracle Workers: The Scientists Behind The COVID-19 Vaccine](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BTNvQC2o.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2021-12-13. For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts._  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Updated: Dec 11, 2023 11:59 PM UTCPublished: Jan 28, 2022 4:00 PM UTC For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts.  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Updated: Dec 11, 2023 11:59 PM UTCPublished: Jan 28, 2022 4:00 PM UTC Even as SARS-CoV-2 gets better at spreading and evading some of the immune protection that people have built through infections or vaccination, new variants inevitably arise. That’s been the case with Omicron (also known as BA.1), which has generated several subvariants, including BA.2, which is beginning to surge in parts of Europe and the U.S. as countries loosen mask-wearing requirements and more people attend large public gatherings. While cases of COVID-19 have been dropping since the beginning of the year in some parts of the world, [including the U.S.](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends%5Fdailycases), it’s too early to predict what BA.2 might mean for the [course of the COVID-19 pandemic](https://time.com/6141679/omicron-end-covid-19/). But detecting and monitoring such variants early will help public health experts better identify which ones pose the most danger to people’s health, and therefore require more stringent mitigation measures. Here’s what we know so far. ## What is the BA.2 variant? BA.2 appears to be a descendant of [Omicron](https://time.com/6138293/omicron-symptoms-covid-19/), or BA.1\. Researchers at the World Health Organization first [reported](https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/) increasing numbers of BA.2 infections in January in Denmark, India, and the U.K. Since then, dozens of countries have reported BA.2 cases, including in nearly every state in the U.S. In about 18 countries, BA.2 is already the dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain responsible for new COVID-19 cases. Scientists found BA.2 thanks to more widespread genetic sequencing, which is helping them detect changes in SARS-CoV-2 more quickly and determine how those mutations might affect human health. In the U.S., such genetic sequencing shows that BA.2 cases [continue to increase](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions), accounting for an estimated 23% of cases in the country. BA.2’s quick foothold around the world is not surprising, given that [studies](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.28.22270044v1) show that variant may be up to 30% more transmissible than the original Omicron—which means that without mitigation measures such as mask-wearing, handwashing, and social distancing, the latest version of Omicron can spread rapidly in communities. ## Is the new BA.2 variant more dangerous than Omicron? Like Omicron, BA.2 contains numerous mutations, according to researchers at the [Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness](https://masscpr.hms.harvard.edu/), a collaboration of academic researchers from different institutes in the Boston area who monitor genetic changes in SARS-CoV-2\. About 20 mutations have been located in the antibody-binding regions that vaccines target. BA.2 also contains some mutations not found in BA.1, but scientists aren’t sure yet what those changes mean. Some of them may make BA.2 more difficult to detect using current PCR testing methods, which is why some scientists have dubbed it the “stealth variant.” A recent [study](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.14.480335v1.full.pdf) in animals from Japanese scientists—which was published on the pre-print server bioRxiv but has not been peer-reviewed—suggests that BA.2 may contain mutations that could lead to more severe disease than Omicron. These mutations may also make the virus resistant to treatments, including monoclonal antibodies, that doctors are currently using to protect vulnerable patients from getting very ill, the research suggests. BA.2 may also escape vaccine protection, but [boosters can make severe disease 74% less likely](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.28.22270044v1), one Danish study found. ## Should you be worried? Studies from around the world about the severity of BA.2 are mixed. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the agency’s scientists are continuing to monitor BA.2’s effects on disease severity. ## **Will the current COVID-19 vaccines work against BA.2?** The protection from vaccines wanes over time, which is why public health officials have authorized booster shots in most countries. For now, the evidence suggests that vaccines generate both immediate and longer lasting immunity against all variants of SARS-CoV-2\. The antibodies that the shots catalyze may only protect against infection for a relatively short amount of time—Moderna reported that even after a booster dose of its vaccine, these virus-neutralizing [antibodies tend to wane after six months](https://time.com/6142852/moderna-booster-wanes-omicron/)—but the body’s immune response to vaccination also includes T cells. These are more durable and are aimed at more conserved regions of the virus; T cells seem to provide good and lasting protection against severe disease from every variant so far, even if people do get infected. ## Transcript Kind: captions Language: en I think vaccines are misunderstood, and maybe it's because it seems like magic. That simplicity and the mystery of it is something that ends up creating a lot of skepticism. People are fooled by the speed. Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready. Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development. In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. But this was truly a moment of the right fix - a brand new kind of vaccine technology - at exactly the right time. I started out in math, and I moved to biology. And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. And so the first part of my career was trying to understand the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease and trying to make vaccines safer. I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work and discover something that no one else in the world knows on any given day. It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. When I first came to Penn from the NIH, pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. Although mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection, it took doctors Karikó and Weissman 16 years to figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. So I repeated the experiment and we could see that there was no inflammation in human cells. We're both scientists. We're not baseball players who cheer when we hit a homerun. We knew that it had great potential. But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. One of the really important problems in coronaviruses that had not been solved is really simple. What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. At that moment, you realize that you have almost what is a universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly. The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months, and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. "Do it mama!" (laughter) Most scientists never get to see a product actually used. And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, those were special moments. I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, and they reported that they received the vaccine. There were like 200 elderly in that home. And nobody died. On social media, when children were going back to visiting their grandparents again. Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases. Influenza, even cancer. 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