The team used blood samples from hospitalized patients with COVID-19 to develop a new modular, customizable blood test known as NEU-SATiN.
They compared it to several other more expensive, slower, established tests and found that it could accurately detect the concentration of neutralizing antibodies in the blood, regardless of the variant with which the patient was infected, in 30 minutes or less.
However, it showed that antibodies generated by vaccination or recovery from Alpha or Delta variants circulating before 2022 barely register against Omicron.
“What that says is if you’ve had a natural infection or you’ve been vaccinated, you’re probably protected from the variant that you had,” study co-author Dr.  Sean Owen from the University of Utah.  “But what it also says is that it gives you no protection whatsoever for later strains, especially the Omicron variant.”
The test could detect medically significant levels of neutralizing antibodies in vaccinated or recovered patients, even more than fifty days after receiving their last dose.
The researchers took these samples and compared them to samples from Omicron-infected patients collected later and found that “almost all samples” of blood from infected patients “were ineffective at neutralizing the Omicron variants.”
  “Our results also suggest that prior infection/vaccination does not provide significant neutralizing protection against the (Omicron) variant,” the study authors wrote.
The new test detects the level of neutralizing antibodies developed against SARS-COV-2 after infection, using commonly available laboratory tools, and can be adapted to detect each new variant that emerges.
Owen said the test is designed in such a way that one can make a new version of it for “every one of the variants” that emerges and becomes dominant.
He said the study also found that there are advantages to gaining immunity, even for a short time, through vaccination rather than recovering from infection.
“It also says that you can get protection from being infected, but you will get sick to do so.  So a vaccine is probably a better option to avoid it and get the same protection.”
Even with the study’s findings, infection expert Dr. Isaac Bogoch says neutralizing antibodies are only one part of the body’s immune system.
“We have many arms and many branches of our immune system to protect us from COVID-19, especially in those people who are vaccinated and up-to-date with their vaccination and of course even in people who have been infected and have recovered from an infection, so it doesn’t bring us back to the beginning”
He said there is other research and a wealth of real-world observations that show vaccination is still very effective at preventing serious outcomes such as death or hospitalization in the Omicron era.
“They do an extremely good job of protecting people from serious infections that involve hospitalization and death, but yes, of course we know that with this BA.5 variant versus other variants, it can wipe out some of the immunity we’ve built up.  It can cause reinfections.”
Ontario health officials said the BA.5 Omicron subvariant, believed to be even more virulent than previous strains, now accounts for more than 60 percent of all infections in the province and is leading to a new wave of the pandemic.