Moderna, one of the two vaccines to be approved in the U.S., announced on Jan. 25 that its version of the vaccine has been shown to work against the coronavirus variants that have put much of the world on edge.

The U.K. variant and the South African variant have spread across much of the world, worrying people about their potentially higher infectious rates and whether they’re more deadly than the original strain of COVID-19. People have also questioned whether the current vaccines in the U.S., the ones made by Pfizer and Moderna, can work against those variants.

Moderna said the answer is yes.

In a news release issued on Jan. 25, Moderna said its vaccine “produced neutralizing titers against all key emerging variants tested, including B.1.1.7 and B.1.351, first identified in the U.K. and Republic of South Africa, respectively.” But Moderna also said it is testing “an additional booster dose” of its vaccine that it hopes will increase the vaccine’s effectiveness against the South African strain.

In late December, the U.K. variant was discovered in California, Colorado, and a handful of other states. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said he thought the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would still work against the variants. Now, Moderna has confirmed it. But the company still plans to evolve its vaccine to keep pace with the variants.

“As we seek to defeat the COVID-19 virus, which has created a worldwide pandemic, we believe it is imperative to be proactive as the virus evolves. We are encouraged by these new data, which reinforce our confidence that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine should be protective against these newly detected variants,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants.”

Dr. Tal Zaks, the company’s chief medical officer, said the booster is basically an insurance policy. “I don’t know if we need it,” Zaks told the New York Times, “and I hope we don’t.”

Dr. Supriya Narasimhan, the chief of infectious diseases at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in California, told Nautilus recently that the currently available vaccines could be tweaked to combat the coronavirus variants.

“We we have not yet distributed enough vaccine to see what vaccine selection pressure does to the virus,” Narasimhan said. “In other words, the vaccine pressure may cause the emergence of more mutations (I certainly hope this does not happen), and if it does, we may have to tweak the vaccine in the future. But what the last year has shown is that we are capable of engineering a novel vaccine in a span of months, so re-engineering them to include mutations is not insurmountable. What seems a bigger issue is the culture of denialism and vaccine hesitancy in the community—people have to take the vaccine for it to work.”

The Pfizer vaccine also appears to work against the variants. As noted by CNN, some of the antibodies created by the vaccines were not effective against some of the mutations, but the many varied antibodies that appeared in the bodies of volunteers was enough to keep the mutations at bay overall. Those who have received both doses of the Pfizer vaccine reportedly have had positive responses against the U.K. and South Africa variants.

“When you start putting all these mixtures of antibodies together, what it means is that together they can take care of the variants,” Dr. Michel Nussenzweig of the Rockefeller University, told CNN.

Meanwhile, researchers said the AstraZeneca vaccine could be ready to fight the variants by the fall of 2021, because, according to the BBC, “tweaking [the] vaccine was a relatively quick process.” But the country of South Africa has paused the distribution of the AstraZeneca vaccine because, so far, it hasn’t been shown to protect against the variant that originated in that country.

Read more on the coronavirus vaccine:

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• Will the Johnson & Johnson vaccine be as effective as Pfizer and Moderna?
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Sources: Moderna, CNN, New York Times

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