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Moderna director predicts existing vaccines will struggle with Omicron

Moderna’s CEO has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective in dealing with Omicron than previous strains of Covid-19 and warned it will be months before companies pharmaceuticals can produce new variant-specific injectable drugs on a large scale.

Stéphane Bancel said the high number of Omicron mutations in the mutant protein, the virus used to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of this variant in South Africa, suggest that the current vaccine season has may need to be revised next year.

“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level. . . we had with Delta,” Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He added: “I think it will be a physical drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for data. But all the scientists I spoke to. . . like ‘this won’t be good’. ”

The Moderna chief executive’s comments come as public health experts and other politicians try to strike a more optimistic tone about the ability of existing vaccines to protect against Omicron.

On Monday, Scott Gottlieb, director of Pfizer and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, told CNBC: “There is a reasonable level of confidence in the vaccine world that [with] at least three doses. . . patients would be fairly well protected against this variant. ”

Joe Biden, the president of the United States, later said Omicron was “a reason to worry, not a cause for panic“, adding that government health experts “believe vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against serious illness”.

However, Bancel said scientists are worried because 32 of the 50 mutations in the Omicron variant are on the mutant protein, the current vaccine is focused on to boost the body’s immune system. to fight Covid-19.

Most experts think such a highly mutated variant won’t emerge for another year or two, Bancel adds.

Bancel’s predictions have rattled investors in Asia, as stocks and futures fell and crude oil prices fell.

In Japan, the benchmark Nikkei 225 index fell as much as 1.1% following the FT report. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is 2.3% lower. S&P 500 futures wiped out early gains leaving US stocks down nearly 1%, while the FTSE 100 is expected to drop 1.2% at the London open.

Fears of this variation have led traders to seek safety in bonds, pushing yields on 10-year US Treasuries down 0.05 percentage points, while in commodity markets, oil Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, reversed a nearly 2% downtrend at $72.04. bin.

Moderna and Pfizer have become the vaccine supplier of choice for most developed countries in the world due to the high efficiency of injections based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

In August, Moderna announced that people getting two doses of its injection “maintained antibodies over the course of six months, including against worrisome variants such as the Delta variant”.

But studies show the company’s vaccine is less effective at stopping Delta outbreaks than previous strains of the virus.

Stanford University research of the Delta outbreak at a California prison announced last month showed that the company’s drill was 56.6% effective against infection. This number is significantly lower than the levels in studies done before Delta appeared, the researchers say.

Moderna and Pfizer are currently working on new vaccines to target the Omicron variant, which the World Health Organization says poses a “very high risk”.

Bancel said the data, which gives an indication of how existing vaccines work against the Omicron variant, and whether it causes severe disease, should be available within two weeks.

However, he said it would be several months before the Omicron-specific vaccine could be produced on a large scale, and suggested there could be a case where more powerful boosters are given to the elderly or those with weakened immune systems. translation is damaged in the meantime.

“[Moderna] and Pfizer can’t get a billion doses next week. The math doesn’t work. But can we eliminate billions of doses by summer? Sure,” said Bancel, who predicts Moderna could make a total of 2 billion-3 billion doses by 2022.

However, he said it would be risky to shift all of Moderna’s production capacity to an Omicron-targeted tank at a time when other variants are still in circulation.

Bancel also criticized critics who accused vaccine manufacturers of not doing enough to support the rollout of vaccinations in developing countries like South Africa, where only a quarter of the population is fully immunized. enough, according to Johns Hopkins University.

“This is mostly a policy decision made by rich countries. In the US, we were told that we had no choice but to supply 60% of our production to the US government. It’s not a decision by Moderna, it’s a decision by the US government,” he said.

Bancel also said there is a surplus of shots destined for Africa and 70 million Moderna vaccines are in storage because of Covax – an international organization tasked with vaccinating low-income countries – or governments of their own. odd did not receive them.

“We are running out of space,” he said. That’s because they don’t have customs clearance, or they don’t have refrigerator space, or because the ability to get doses of the drug in a weapon is a challenge. ”

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