Moderna CEO: Vaccines will be less effective against mutant

Hard data are still weeks away, but Moderna’s CEO is already expecting vaccines to struggle with the omicron variant of COVID.

“All the scientists I’ve talked to ... are like, ‘This is not going to be good,’ ” Stéphane Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday.

It’s still unclear whether the omicron variant, first discovered in South Africa, will evade vaccines and/or spread more rapidly than the delta variant, but the number of mutations has experts worried.

“I think it’s going to be a material drop [in effectiveness],” Bancel told the publication. “I just don’t know how much because we need to wait for the data.”

The omicron variant has 50 mutations from the current dominant strain of the virus, the delta variant. While the virus is constantly mutating, the omicron variant is special because 32 of the 50 mutations occur on the crucial spike protein that has been targeted by vaccines.

The spike protein is how the virus enters a person’s cells and spreads; the available vaccines are focused on stopping the protein.

“There is no world, I think, where [effectiveness] is the same level … we had with delta,” Bancel said.

Health officials noticed the variant when cases spiked in South Africa. The country was averaging about 200 COVID cases per day until last week, when numbers quickly jumped from 1,000 to 2,000 to 3,000. That prompted the gene sequencing that discovered the omicron variant.

Other nations moved quickly to cut off travel from South Africa and neighboring countries, but U.S. health officials have admitted the strain will almost certainly enter the country, if it isn’t here already.

“When you have a virus that is showing this degree of transmissibility and you’re already having travel-related cases that they’ve noted in Israel and Belgium and other places — when you have a virus like this — it almost invariably is ultimately going to go essentially all over,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.