Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine is expected to be effective against new variants of the virus, according to the company.
In a Monday statement, the company said the two-dose vaccine “is expected to be protective against emerging strains detected to date” but added that out of “an abundance of caution,” they have decided to implement a “clinical strategy to proactively address the pandemic as the virus continues to evolve.”
Moderna will also perform tests to see whether “an additional booster dose of” the vaccine would “further increase neutralizing titers against reemerging strains” and will be “advancing an emerging variant booster candidate” against the virus mutations first identified in South Africa.
“As we seek to defeat the COVID-19 virus, which has created a worldwide pandemic, we believe it is imperative to be proactive as the virus evolves. We are encouraged by these new data, which reinforce our confidence that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should be protective against these newly detected variants,” Stéphane Bancel, the chief executive officer of Moderna, said in a statement.
“Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants,” he said.
Similarly, the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine is also expected to combat the mutant coronavirus strain, first detected in the United Kingdom, as effectively as it can other more common variants observed in the United States.
The South African variant has not yet been detected in the U.S., however, it has been found in 22 other countries, including Canada, France, Germany, and China, as of late last week, according to the Wall Street Journal. Comparatively, the variant that was first discovered in the U.K. has been discovered in 12 states, according to CNBC.
Shortly after being inaugurated last week, President Biden signed a 100-day mask mandate requiring people to wear masks on all federal properties and is expected to ban travel from certain countries in an effort to curb the stop of the highly contagious variant. In addition to announcing that the U.S. would rejoin the World Health Organization, Biden said he would reestablish the pandemic preparedness office in the National Security Council, which was dissolved under former President Donald Trump.
The U.S. has more than 25,000,000 confirmed virus cases with more than 406,000 deaths attributed to it, according to a tabulation from Johns Hopkins University.
