Pfizer Announces New Omicron Variant Vaccine Ready in March

The US pharmaceutical Pfizer said on Monday that it hopes to have a new vaccine against covid-19 in March that improve protection against omicron variant.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explained that it is not yet clear whether this new product will be necessary, but said that your company is already starting to manufacture the first doses since some countries want to have them as soon as possible. “The hope is that we will achieve something that has much better protection, particularly against infections, because protection against hospitalizations and serious illness right now is reasonable with current vaccines, as long as the third dose has been administered,” Bourla told the CNBC television channel.

The CEO of Pfizer explained that the new version seeks greater immunity to omicron, but would continue to offer protection against other variants. Although the product will be ready in March, Bourla made it clear that he still does not know if its use will be necessary, doubts that he extended to the use of a fourth dose of the current vaccine, which countries such as Israel have already begun to test. “I don’t know if there is a need for a fourth booster dose, but it has to be tested. We will do experiments,” he said.

Meanwhile, the company Moderna hopes to have a new booster dose available next fall of its vaccine designed specifically to combat the omicron variant, its CEO, Stephane Bancel, also interviewed by CNBC, said on Monday.

Bancel explained that the company is in talks with health authorities around the world to decide the best strategy to administer this possible dose in the fall of the northern hemisphere. “There are discussions daily. We want to be ready with the best possible product by fall 2022,” the executive stressed.

In December, when it announced that it was going to start clinical studies earlier this year for the new booster dose, Moderna already warned that, if these were successful, it would still take months for the product to be available. The biotechnology firm, however, has already closed agreements with countries such as the United Kingdom, South Korea or Switzerland worth about 18,500 million dollars.

Bancel said that Moderna has the capacity to provide between two and three billion booster doses this year and he assured that the difficulties are no longer in the volume of production, but rather in distribution, especially in developing countries.

In that sense, the executive said that during last November his company had between 50 and 100 million doses daily waiting to be sent to low-income nations. Moderna had already anticipated last month that it was going to start working on adapting its product to the new omicron variant, which is infecting many vaccinated people.

According to the studies, vaccines continue to significantly reduce the possibility of suffering a severe case, a protection that is even greater in the case of people who have recently received a booster dose.