Moderna CEO says existing vaccines will struggle with Omicron

The chief executive of Moderna (Nasdaq: MRNA) has predicted that existing vaccines against COVID-19 will be much less effective at tackling the Omicron variant than earlier strains of coronavirus and warned it would take months before pharmaceutical companies could manufacture new variant-specific jabs at scale, the Financial Times reported today.

Stéphane Bancel said the high number of Omicron mutations on the spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of the variant in South Africa suggested that the current crop of vaccines may need to be modified next year.

“There is no world, I think, where [the effectiveness] is the same level . . . we had with [the] Delta [variant],” Mr Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.