US scientists working to upgrade Covid vaccines for variants, says Fauci

US scientists are preparing to upgrade Covid-19 vaccines to address variants of the coronavirus now circulating in the UK and South Africa, Dr Anthony Fauci said on Monday. At the same time, Moderna said that though its Covid vaccine worked against the variants, it was developing a new form to be used as a booster shot.

“We’re doing it today to be ahead of the curve should we need to,” Dr Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, told the New York Times. “I think of it as an insurance policy.

“I don’t know if we need it, and I hope we don’t.”

Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert who is advising Joe Biden, spoke to NBC and CBS on Monday morning, a day after the US Covid caseload passed 25m, with close to 420,000 deaths.

Fauci said the new variants of the coronavirus were not only more infectious but did not respond as well to monoclonal antibodies that have been used in treating Covid patients. He said he was especially concerned about the South African variant, which he described as “different and more ominous than the one in the UK”.

“The data has not come out officially, but taking a look at the preliminary data that the UK scientists have analyzed, I’m pretty convinced that there is a degree of increase in seriousness of the actual infection, which we really have to keep an eye on,” Fauci said.

Fauci said there is also “a very slight, modest diminution” of the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines against those variants but “there’s enough cushion with the vaccines that we have that we still consider them to be effective against both the UK strain and the South Africa strain.

“We really need to make sure that we begin, and we already have, to prepare if it’s necessary to upgrade the vaccines,” Fauci said. “We’re already taking steps in that direction despite the fact that the vaccines we have now do work.”

The rollout of vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna has not been smooth, the president’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, telling NBC on Sunday the Trump administration had left Biden little to work with.

“The process to distribute the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals out into the community as a whole, did not really exist when we came into the White House,” Klain said.