A bottle of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, which the company says should work against new strains of the virus.
Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesModerna’s Covid-19 vaccine should offer protection from emerging new strains of the virus, according to the company’s CEO. Whether that’s true in a year or two is an open question.
Speaking at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs on Tuesday morning, Moderna (ticker: MRNA) CEO Stéphane Bancel said that his company believes that it’s very likely that its vaccine will work with the new Covid-19 strains first identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Still, he said, if the virus continues to mutate, that could lead to a situation in a year or two where the current vaccine is no longer able to provide protection. In that case, he said that Moderna could quickly develop a new version of the vaccine that protects against the new strain, to be mixed with the old version of the vaccine and delivered as a cocktail.
Anxiety around the new strains has risen in recent weeks, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that the strains that emerged in the U.K. and South Africa appear to spread more easily than earlier versions of the virus. Individuals infected with the U.K. strain have since been identified in the U.S., including in New York.
Moderna first said on December 23 that it expects its vaccine to protect from the U.K. strain. “Based on the data to date, Moderna expects that the vaccine-induced immunity from the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine would be protective against the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus recently described in the UK,” the company said at the time.
Bancel also elaborated on Tuesday morning on a statement the company made on Monday, in which it announced it was increasing its base-case estimate for production of the Covid-19 vaccine, saying it now expected to make 600 million doses this year, up from its previous estimate of 500 million doses. The company says it hopes to make as many as 1 billion doses. At the conference, Bancel said that its output would depend on the yield achieved in its manufacturing process, and the availability of raw materials.
The conversation took place amid an ongoing debate as to whether officials should diverge from the vaccine’s emergency use authorization guidelines to allow more people to be vaccinated with the currently available vaccine materials. Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui said over the weekend that Warp Speed was in talks with Moderna and the FDA about halving the amount of vaccine in each injection in order to offer protection to more people. On Monday, the FDA put out a statement rejecting the idea, saying that, while the question was worth investigating in clinical trials, “suggesting changes to the FDA-authorized dosing or schedules of these vaccines is premature and not rooted solidly in the available evidence.”
Bancel, speaking at the panel, echoed the FDA, saying that the company stood by the FDA-authorized dose.
Shares of Moderna were down 3.6% on Tuesday. The stock climbed more than 700% between January and November of last year, but then tumbled in December.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
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January 06, 2021 at 01:10AM
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Moderna’s Covid Vaccine Should Work Against New Strains—for Now. What Its CEO Said. - Barron's
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