A nurse prepares a syringe with a dose of Moderna coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine at the Enfermera Isabel Zendal hospital in Madrid, Spain, July 23, 2021.
Juan Medina | Reuters
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel on Thursday said the booster’s effectiveness against Covid-19 is likely to decrease over time and people may need a fourth shot in the fall to increase their chances guard.
Bancel said people who received their boosters last fall will likely have enough protection to weather the winter, when new infections increase as people gather indoors to escape the cold.
However, Bancel said the booster’s effectiveness will likely decrease over several months, similar to what happened with the first two doses. The Moderna director was interviewed by Goldman Sachs during the investment bank’s Healthcare CEOs conference.
“I’d be surprised when we get that data in the coming weeks that it holds up well over time – I expect it won’t be very good,” Bancel said, referring to the strength of the company. booster injections.
An unprecedented wave of infections from the highly contagious omicron variant is now spreading worldwide. In the US, the seven-day average is now more than 574,000 new cases per day, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University.
The Moderna chief executive said governments, including the UK and South Korea, had ordered doses of the drug in preparation. “I still believe we will need boosters by the fall of ’22 onward,” Bancel said, adding that people who are older or have underlying health conditions may need boosters every year for many years. next year.
“We’ve said we believe this virus won’t go away first,” Bancel said. “We’ll have to live with it.”
Moderna released preliminary data last month showing that their now authorized 50-microgram booster shot increased the amount of antibodies that block infection from omicrons by 37-fold. Boosting 100 micrograms increased those antibodies 83-fold.
Booster shots are increasingly playing an increasingly important role in public health strategies to control the virus, with protection from the initial two injections taking a hit from the omicron.
Data from the UK show that Moderna and Pfizer’s two-dose vaccines are only about 10% effective at preventing symptomatic infections caused by omicrons 20 weeks after the second dose.
The same study published by the UK Health Security Agency found that the booster dose was effective at preventing symptomatic infections by up to 75% two weeks after the injection.
However, the effectiveness of booster shots started to decrease after about 4 weeks, according to the study. The booster was 55% to 70% effective at preventing infection at weeks five to nine and 40% to 50% effective for 10 weeks after injection.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC last month that people may need a fourth dose, and may need it earlier than expected due to omicron’s virulence.
Bancel, in the Goldman Sachs interview, said omicrons could accelerate the transition from the acute crisis caused by the virus to the endemic phase, where enough people have immune protection so that Covid does not cause affect community life.
However, he also warned against the predictions, noting that the omicron, with its dozens of mutations, has surprised most of the scientific community. Data to date indicate that omicrons are more transmissible but less severe than previous strains.
However, a random mutation could change the course of the pandemic again, Bancel said.
“It’s completely unpredictable, whether a new mutation that occurs in a day, a week, three months could be worse in terms of disease severity,” he said. “That’s the part where we’re going to have to be cautious.”
