A European health emergency official said on Wednesday that adapted versions of messenger RNA vaccines against Covid-19, which target two variants at once, will soon offer people better protection than vaccines. that are already available.
Moderna and Pfizer are developing vaccines based on a combination of the original Wuhan coronavirus and a subvariant of Omicron. Called bivalent injections, they would be used in a fall vaccination campaign, which begins in September in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Any bivalent vaccine available will be good. It will be better than current vaccines,” Director of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority Pierre Delsaux told members of the European Parliament at a hearing.
He did not take sides in the ongoing discussion between European regulators and vaccine manufacturers over which subtype of Omicron such tailored doses should be modeled on.
The European Medicines Agency has not yet expressed a clear preference for the subvariant – BA.1 or BA.4/BA.5 – on which these injections should be based.
BioNTech and Pfizer also proposed an injection based only on a subvariant of Ômicron.
New generation of vaccines
In June, Pfizer released promising data on the adapted version of two vaccines, one monovalent and one bivalent. While one is a combination of Pfizer’s vaccine, the other is targeted at the Spike protein of the BA.1 lineage of Ômicron.
According to Pfizer, data from the Phase 2 and 3 study indicated that a booster dose of both adapted vaccine candidates elicited a substantially greater immune response against BA.1 from Omicron BA.1 compared to the current vaccine. Robust immune response was observed at two dose levels of 30 and 60 micrograms.
On July 8, Moderna presented new clinical data on the messenger RNA vaccine targeting the Ômicron variant. Results show expressive antibody responses compared to the current booster dose. The booster dose of 50 micrograms showed a safety profile in the study that involved 437 volunteers.
(With information from Lucas Rocha, from CNN)
Source: CNN Brasil
