BioNTech confident its vaccine will work on new coronavirus strain
- The BioNtech vaccine, developed with Pfizer, has been authorised in more than 45 countries and has been administered to hundreds of thousands
- The German company said the new Covid-19 variant has the same proteins and it has ‘scientific confidence’ its vaccine will be effective
“We don’t know at the moment if our vaccine is also able to provide protection against this new variant,” CEO Ugur Sahin told a news conference the day after the vaccine was approved for use in the European Union. “But scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variants.”
Sahin said the proteins on the UK variant are 99 per cent the same as on the prevailing strains, and therefore BioNTech has “scientific confidence” that its vaccine will be effective.
“But we will know it only if the experiment is done and we will need about two weeks from now to get the data,” he said. “The likelihood that our vaccine works … is relatively high.”
Should the vaccine need to be adjusted for the new variant the company could do so in about six weeks, Sahin said, though regulators might have to approve the changes before the shots can be used.
Having to adjust the vaccine would be a blow for the roll-out of immunisation campaigns and the effort to rein in the pandemic that has so far killed more than 1.7 million people worldwide.
BioNTech’s vaccine, which was developed together with US pharmaceutical company Pfizer, has been authorised for use in more than 45 countries including Britain, the United States and the EU. Hundreds of thousands of people have already received the shots.