“No one can say for the moment what is coming our way,” warns the German government’s medical adviser
The German laboratory BioNTech, together with the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, created the first vaccine against coronavirus, has begun to work on the development of a specific preparation to immunize against the Omicron variant of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. This is a common reaction from the German laboratory based in the town of Mainz, the company said this Monday.
“The first steps in the development coincide with the studies on whether in the end it will really be necessary to have a new vaccine” to suppress the variant discovered for the first time in South Africa, but which in the meantime has already been located in several European countries, including Germany . BioNTech stressed that it is still unknown if current vaccines are effective against the omicron variant, but that at the latest in two weeks they will have certainty on that question.
Meanwhile Christian Drosten, medical adviser to the German federal government and head of the virology department at the Charité university hospital in Berlin, expressed concern about the new variant, fearing that it could circumvent the immune defenses that vaccines develop. Drosten acknowledged that very little is still known about the Omicron variant, among other things because there are not more than a thousand known cases of infections, which is insufficient to still know enough details about how it acts.
“No one can say at the moment what is coming to us. The only thing that can be said for sure is that it is better to be vaccinated. And even better if the soda vaccine has been received, ”said Drosten, for whom existing vaccines prevent at least one serious development of the disease.
The German expert commented that laboratories will be able to adapt their vaccines to the new variant without problems. “Technically it is a relatively simple process, but we are talking about months” until a specific vaccine against the Omicron variant is distributed, warned the head of the department of virology at the Charité. Christian Drosten also acknowledged that it is “very worrying” that a variant with so many mutations has emerged.
The Moderna pharmaceutical company also announced on Sunday that it could have a vaccine against this variant for the beginning of next year, although it also showed its prevention regarding the effect of this strain, of which more data is expected in the next two weeks.
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