The company behind Pfizer-BioNTech says that the vaccine they produced can protect people from the new COVID-19 variant.
If needed, the vaccine can be re-engineered in a matter of weeks, said BioNTech’s representative.
Currently, the new variant of the virus is 70% quicker to spread, as it received high numbers of people contracting it from the south-east of England.
Some other parts of Europe that harbor this virus is Denmark, Netherlands, and South-Africa.
VOC-202012/01, the name of the variant contains 23 mutations, a particularly large sum all in one time, which biologically can turn more and more unstable and cause them to behave unpredictably.
“Scientifically, it is highly likely that [the] immune response by this vaccine also can deal with the new virus variant”, Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech, said at a news conference in Germany.
The company also claims that they have the technology to process the vaccine quickly if necessary.
“The beauty of the Messenger RNA 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, so that means a vaccine which contains this information,” Mr. Sahin said.
Mr. Sahin is confident that their vaccine could provide necessary protection against the new variant of the COVID-19.
Source: BBC