BREAKING! Moderna’s Chief Admits That Current Vaccines Might be Ineffective Against Omicron And Foresees A Worrying Pandemic State
Source: Medical News Nov 30, 2021 2 years, 4 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 16 hours, 21 minutes ago
Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bance has predicted that existing vaccines will be much less effective at tackling the Omicron variant than earlier strains of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies could manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale.
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In the meanwhile, the pandemic coud take for a more catastrosphic turn with millions more dying.
He said the high number of Omicron mutations on the spike protein (32 mutations), which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa suggested that the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.
Bancel told media, “There is no world, I think, where the effectiveness is the same level . . . we had with the Delta variant.”
Bancel added, “I think it’s going to be a material drop. I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I’ve talked saying that this is not going to be good.”
Ironically, the Moderna chief executive’s comments come as public health experts and politicians have tried to strike a more upbeat tone about existing vaccines’ capacity to confer protection against Omicron.
It was reported that on Monday, Scott Gottlieb, a director of Pfizer and former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, told media, “There’s a reasonable degree of confidence in vaccine circles that with at least three doses . . . the patient is going to have fairly good protection against this variant.”
Note that this is the same moron that first said the virus would be gone in the United States by thanksgiving 2021 then said that the US would see no COVID19 by February 2022!
The old senile geriatric Joe Biden, US president, subsequently said Omicron was “a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” adding that the government’s medical experts “believe that the vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against severe disease”.
Alarmingly however, Bancel said researchers were worried because 32 of the 59 mutations in the
Omicron variant are on the spike protein, which current vaccines focus on to boost the human body’s immune system to combat COVID.
Bancel added that most experts thought such a highly mutated variant would not emerge for another year or two.
He said detailed data indicating how existing vaccines performed against the Omicron variant, and whether it caused severe disease, should become available within two weeks.
However, it would take several months before an Omicron-specific vaccine could be produced at scale, and suggested there might be a case for giving more potent boosters to the elderly or people with compromised immune systems in the meantime.
He also stressed the issues about vaccine production capacity. “Moderna and Pfizer cannot get a billion doses next week. The maths doesn’t work. But could we get the billion doses out by the summer? Sure.&a
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He predicted Moderna could make a total of 2 to 3 billion doses in 2022.
However, Bancel warned that it would be risky to shift Moderna’s entire production capacity to an Omicron-targeted jab at a time when other variants were still in circulation.
He also hit out at critics who have accused vaccine makers of not doing enough to support rollouts in developing countries such as South Africa, where only a quarter of the population is fully inoculated, according to Johns Hopkins University.
He said, “This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries. In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 per cent of our output to the US government. That was not a Moderna decision, that was a US government decision.”
He also said there was a surplus of jabs earmarked for Africa and that 70 million Moderna vaccines were sitting in warehouses because Covax, an international body that is part of the WHO, tasked with supplying low-income nations, or individual governments had not taken delivery of them.
He said, “We are running out of space. It’s because either they don’t have customs documents, or they don’t have fridge space, or because the ability to get doses in arms is a challenge.”
WHO director-general did not comment when media contacted his office to ask comments about this!
Meanwhile it was reported that the Moderna chief’s predictions panicked investors in Europe and Asia on Tuesday, with equities and crude prices dropping. The European Stoxx 600 share index fell around 1.3 per cent with the UK’s FTSE 100, Germany’s Dax and France’s Cac 40 all down by around the same margin. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was 2.3 per cent lower.
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Omicron Variant, keep on logging to Thailand Medical News.
