Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said the Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Covid-19 vaccines will still be essential tools against new emerging variants of the virus – although companies have said their vaccines may be less potent against a strain found in South Africa.
On January 28, Novavax said its vaccine was almost 90% effective in protecting against Covid-19 in its phase three trial in the UK, but had a silent response in South Africa, with an effectiveness rate of only 49.4% among 44 cases in the country. A day later, J&J said its vaccine was 66% effective overall, but only 57% effective in South Africa, where the B.1.351 strain is spreading rapidly.
Gates, whose foundation has donated millions for coronavirus vaccines and treatment research, told CNBC that the two vaccines, which have not yet been authorized for use in the United States, still retain “a lot of capacity against” variants.
People understand that “there is reduced effectiveness, although Novavax and Johnson & Johnson still retain a lot of capacity against these variants,” he told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview that aired on Thursday in the “Squawk Box” .
Gates questioned whether a third dose of a vaccine would be sufficient booster to protect against new variants.
“There is a rich dialogue between our foundation, Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and others in the government now on this variant strategy, “said Gates, co-president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and also a co-founder of Microsoft.
Gates’ comments come at a time when US officials are pressing Americans to get vaccinated as soon as possible, before potentially new and even more dangerous variants of the virus emerge.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified 1,277 cases of variant B.1.1.7 first identified in the United Kingdom. The agency identified 19 cases of strain B.1.351 from South Africa, as well as three cases of P .1, a variant identified for the first time in Brazil.
The United States needs to rapidly deploy Covid-19 vaccines and increase its genetic sequencing of variants before the virus mutates again and makes the pandemic even worse, said the head of the CDC in an article published on Wednesday.
Variant B.1.1.7 proved to be highly transmissible and “preliminary data suggest the possibility of an increased severity of the disease with infection,” wrote CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky in a research opinion published in the Journal of the American Medical Association or JAMA.
Fauci, the White House’s chief medical advisor and the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist, has said repeatedly in recent weeks that viruses cannot mutate if they have no hosts to infect and cannot replicate.
Fauci also recently released the J&J vaccine, saying that while it looked less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it was still able to keep people out of the hospital and prevent them from getting serious illnesses.
“The most important thing, more important than preventing someone from having pain and a sore throat, is to prevent people from” contracting serious illnesses, “said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in a call with reporters on January 29. “This will greatly relieve stress, human suffering and death in this epidemic.
Gates was also confident that nations and drug makers will be able to accelerate manufacturing so that there are enough doses to immunize the world. He added that bringing vaccines to developing countries will be “the only way to end the pandemic”.