Omicron runs fast, Big Pharma tries to outrun her. It is in this competition between an extremely contagious variant which, as Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said, “changes the rules of the game”, and the companies in the forefront of vaccine production that the fate of Covid will be decided in the coming months.
At a factory 20 miles north of Boston, hundreds of Pfizer workers are preparing to produce millions of doses of a new vaccine that could mark the next stage in the fight against the virus that has been affecting our lives for two years now.
The work on the “booster”, as reported by the Bloomberg agency, began the day after Thanksgiving Day on November 25 at the Andover, Massachusetts plant, just as the World Health Organization was designating a new strain of coronavirus, Omicron, as a variant to keep under observation. The goal is to produce a booster adapted to neutralize the virus in its highly mutated variant in less than 100 days.
So many uncertainties
Nobody knows yet how serious the infections will be caused by the new variant which is spreading rapidly around the world and which in the next few hours will already be prevalent in London. White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said early studies of its severity have so far been “encouraging.” But according to laboratory data from around the world, the new strain appears to be more capable of evading existing vaccines than the Delta.
Of the 43 U.S. Omicron infections analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most involved people who completed the vaccination course, although nearly all cases were relatively mild. Numbers still too low to draw conclusions. However, researchers are alarmed by the approximately 30 mutations in the spike protein that facilitate coronavirus entry into cells. Changes in its appearance make it more difficult for antibodies to find and destroy the variant. This prompted Pfizer, its partner BioNTech and competitor Moderna to immediately begin studying a recall capable of intercepting these mutations.