President of Moderna: Some COVID strains ‘better hiding’ from vaccines

As new variants of COVID-19 emerge around the world, vaccine developers are watching closely how each can handle its doses.

On the radar are new strains of the virus from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil – all detected in the United States – and some are more worrying than others.

“As we follow the pandemic data, what we see is that some of the new emerging strains are better at hiding from these vaccines,” the president of Moderna, Inc., Cambridge, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” ​​on Monday website. “Now, right now, the good news is that vaccines seem to work against all emerging strains. This is good news. But there is a couple … obviously, the South African is worrying, because it looks like he could hide from the vaccine a little better than others. “

Last week, Moderna announced that the company plans to conduct a clinical trial for a “booster” injection to better combat the South African variant, after its studies have shown that its vaccine stimulates a weaker immune response to the mutation than against others.

The company said its vaccine should still offer sufficient protection against the variant. But the lower antibody count produced by the vaccine in the face of the variant “may suggest a potential risk of early impairment of immunity,” Moderna said in a statement.

“Our approach at Moderna will be to develop a booster vaccine, so that if the South African variant or any other variant becomes a concern, we can offer a way to … prevent it from hiding from the vaccine.” Hoge said.

Asked how Moderna is able to develop a vaccine to deal with new variants, Hoge said that scientists are able to learn what a variant looks like because of the sequencing information.

He called it “one of the great advances that is happening in science globally associated with the pandemic”.

“What we can then do as a result of our technology, mRNA, is actually copy and paste that information into our vaccine cassette and then just start adding it to the vaccine, so that your immune system, when you receive it the vaccine will also be able to identify the variant, ”said Hoge.