“This is not going to do it”: pessimism about the effectiveness of existing anti-Covid vaccines against Omicron – LCI

“Every scientist I’ve spoken to says, ‘This is not going to do it.” In an interview with Financial Times, the boss of the pharmaceutical laboratory Moderna on Tuesday displayed a pessimism about the effectiveness of existing vaccines against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

There will be one “significant drop” the effectiveness of current vaccines against Omicron, estimates Stéphane Bancel with the British daily without however being able to quantify it for lack of precise data, which should be available over the next two weeks.

“I rather want to think, but I have to be careful, that the vaccination as it has been done is likely to protect at least partially (…) to what extent I do not know nothing”, for his part, estimated the Chairman of the Steering Committee for the anti-Covid-19 vaccine strategy, Alain Fischer, this Monday on LCI.

“At worst or worst of worst, there would remain the option of developing new vaccines that no longer use the spike protein of the ‘Wuhan virus’ but replace it with the spike of the Omicron virus.”, he continued, believing that “it can go very quickly”.

Stéphane Bancel wanted more nuance concerning the establishment of a large-scale production of this new vaccine which could take “several months”.

Various manufacturers, including Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer / BioNTech and Novavax have indeed announced that they are starting to work on this hypothesis, saying they are confident in their ability to fight Omicron by creating a new vaccine. Russia has announced that it is working on a version of its “Sputnik V” specifically targeting Omicron, in the “unlikely case” where the current serum would not suffice. If so, the country would be ready to “Provide hundreds of millions of booster doses against the Omicron variant for the international market by February 20”, said the Russian Sovereign Fund.

“If it were necessary to change existing vaccines, we might be able to get them approved within three to four months,” from the moment the manufacturers “would begin to modify” their sera, Emer Cooke, director of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), told a European Parliament committee. The decision as to whether further injections would be necessary, however, should be made by other bodies, she said.

“It is good to start this process even if it means stopping it if it is not necessary”, had estimated Monday Professor Alain Fischer, recalling that these companies had already proceeded in this way “for the previous Delta and Gamma variants” corn “there was no need to go much further and so much the better”.