Moderna CEO Repeats That Vaccine Won’t Work For Omicron; Antibody Cocktails Also Need Modification | ZeroHedge
Francesco Abbruzzino, The Uncensored Report, LLC
After spending yesterday doing interviews with practically every major American news organization, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel on Tuesday tanked shares in his own company after telling Britain’s premier financial newspaper that he expects vaccines will “struggle” to stop the omicron variant.
Existing jabs will be less effective at tackling omicron than earlier strains of COVID, and it may take months before pharmaceutical companies can manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale, Bancel warned in an interview with the FT.
The CEO predicted a “material drop” in the current jabs’ efficacy at fighting omicron.
Given the large number of mutations in omicron’s spike protein (which is critical to the virus’s ability to infect human cells), along with the “rapid spread” of the new variant in South Africa, Bancel believes the current crop of vaccines will need to be modified by next year.
Bancel told the FT that “there is no world where [the effectiveness] is the same level…we had with Delta,” during an interview at Moderna’s headquarters. Most experts believed such a highly mutated variant wouldn’t emerge for another year or two, Bancel added.
#Omicron Variant First Detected in Four People Who Were Fully Vaccinated