The American pharmaceutical company Moderna, creator of one of the most used vaccines against covid-19, this Sunday placed the hypothetical development of a new injection adapted to the omicron variant for early 2022.
“If we have to create a completely new vaccine, that will be in early 2022,” Moderna’s chief medical officer, Paul Burton, said in an interview on the BBC.
Burton also pointed out in Andrew Marr’s program on British television that the pharmaceutical company has hundreds of people working on this new strain since Thursday and explained that in the coming weeks they plan to have been able to determine the effectiveness of the existing vaccine against omicron.
Since the new variant was identified in the middle of last week, the main manufacturers of vaccines against COVID-19 in the West, including the American Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, began to test the effectiveness of their products against this strain. .
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech issued a statement on Friday in which they explained that their laboratories are already analyzing this variant to determine if their vaccine (one of the most used in the US and in European countries) might need some type of ” adjustment”.
For its part, Moderna warned that the mutations observed in the variant are “worrisome” and explained that it will test several booster doses of its vaccine to see what the reaction is.
Johnson & Johnson, which markets its vaccine in Europe under the name of its Janssen subsidiary, noted that it is already testing the effectiveness of its product “against the new fast-spreading variant that was identified in South Africa.”
The American Novavax and the British AstraZeneca also said they were analyzing the effect of their vaccines against this new variant.
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