Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said the Covid-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax would still be essential tools against new, emerging variants of the virus – although the companies said their shots could be less powerful against a tension occurring in South Africa.
On 28 January, Novavax stated that the vaccine was almost 90% effective in protecting against Covid-19 in its phase three trial conducted in the United Kingdom but had a subdued response in South Africa, with a efficiency rate of only 49.4% among 44 cases in the country. A day later, J&J said the vaccine was 66% effective, but only 57% effective in South Africa, where strain B.1.351 is spreading rapidly.
Gates, whose foundation has donated millions to coronavirus vaccine and treatment research, told CNBC that the two vaccines, which have not yet been approved for use in the United States, still have “many abilities against” variants.
People understand that ‘there is reduced efficiency, although Novavax and Johnson & Johnson still retain a lot of capacity against these variants,’ he told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview on “Squawk Box” on Thursday. was broadcast.
Gates is questioning whether a third dose of a vaccine will be a boost to protect against new variants.
“There is a rich dialogue between our foundation, Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and the other government people on this variety strategy, ” said Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as co-founder of Microsoft.
Gates’ remarks come as U.S. officials are pushing Americans to vaccinate as quickly as possible before potentially new and even more dangerous variants of the virus emerge.
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention on Tuesday identified 1,277 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the UK. The agency identified 19 cases of the B.1.351 strain from South Africa, as well as three cases of P.1, a variant first identified in Brazil.
The head of the CDC said that the US must deploy Covid-19 vaccines quickly and sharpen the genetic sequence of variants before the virus can mutate again and exacerbate the pandemic.
The B.1.1.7 variant appears to be highly transmissible, and ‘preliminary data indicate the possibility of increased severity of disease with infection’, writes the CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, in a research opinion published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. , or JAMA.
Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House and the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, has repeatedly said in recent weeks that viruses cannot mutate if they do not have hosts to infect and cannot recur.
Fauci also recently unveiled the J&J vaccine, saying that although it appears to be less effective than Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, he was still able to keep people out of the hospital and prevent them from getting serious illnesses.
“The most important thing, more important than hurting someone and preventing a sore throat, is to prevent people” from getting serious diseases, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said on January 29 in a call with reporters. . “It will alleviate so much tension and human suffering and death in this epidemic.
Gates was also confident that countries and drug manufacturers would be able to increase production so that there are enough doses to immunize the world. He added that the “only way to end the pandemic” is to get the shots fired in developing countries.