Moderna CEO Predicts Existing Vaccines Less Effective Against Omicron, Awaits for Data

The Chief Executive of Moderna – Stephane Bancel, predicts existing vaccines will be much less effective to Omicron variant compared to earlier strains, as reported by Financial Times. He also warned it would take months to manufacture reformulated vaccines at large scale.

“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level . . . we had with Delta,”, Bancel told Financial times.

He noted how the existing vaccines would perform against Omicron and whether the variant causes severe diseases would be available within two weeks after data comes in hand.

“Moderna and Pfizer cannot get a billion doses next week. The maths doesn’t work. But could we get the billion doses out by the summer? Sure,” said Bancel. He hopes Moderna could make a total of 2bn-3bn doses in 2022.

The pharmaceutical CEO also fired at critics on not doing enough to rollout jobs in developing countries. “This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries. In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 per cent of our output to the US government. That was not a Moderna decision, that was a US government decision,” he said as reported by FT.