COVID-19: BioNTech confident its vaccine will be effective against new strain in UK

BioNTech Chief Executive Ugur Sahin on December 21 said that it was “highly likely” that the COVID-19 vaccine co-developed by his company would be effective against the mutated strain detected in the UK. While speaking on Bild TV, Sahin said that his company would investigate the new mutation in the coming days. He also added that the German firm could adopt the vaccine if necessary in six weeks. 

Countries across the globe have shut their borders to Britain due to fears about the highly infectious new coronavirus strain. In a televised statement, Sahin informed that the variant detected in the United Kingdom has nine mutations, rather than just one as is usually common. However, he also added that the immune response by the vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech can deal with the new variant. 

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Sahin said, “Scientifically, it is highly likely that the immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant. But if needed, in principle the beauty of the messenger technology is that we can directly start to engineer a vaccine which completely mimics this new mutation -- we could be able to provide a new vaccine technically within six weeks”. 

Further, he also voiced confidence that the vaccine co-developed by his firm would be efficient because it contains more than 1,000 amino acids, and only nine of them have changed, meaning 99 per cent of the protein is still the same. Sahin said that currently tests are being run on the variant and result are expected in two weeks. 

“We have scientific confidence that the vaccine might protect but we will only know it if the experiment is done... we will publish the data as soon as possible,” he said. 

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EU authorises Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine

The new strain of coronavirus has been detected in countries across Europe. With over 1,000 cases of the variant discovered in the UK, scientists are puzzled to determine if the variant, named as VUI-202012/01, falls into which category or if it represents an increased health risk especially when some nations began administering the COVID-19 vaccines among people. On Monday, the EMA’s head of Anti-infectives and Vaccines Marco Cavaleri said that it was “really too early” to say if the new variant of the virus would compromise the strength of the vaccine, but that “for the time being we are not worried”. 

Meanwhile, Sahin’s comments come shortly after the European Union cleared regulatory hurdles for the vaccine to be rolled out after Christmas. The EU said that the first phase of the bloc’s mass inoculation programme will begin later this week. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said that it was recommending the shot be licensed for use in people over 16 years of age with some exceptions.

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READ: COVID-19: EU Authorises Pfizer/BioNTech's Vaccine, Inoculation To Begin From Dec 27