Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said Johnson & Johnson and Novavax Covid-19 vaccines will continue to be essential tools against new emerging variants of the virus, although companies have said their shots may be less potent against a strain that is located in South Africa.
On 28 January, Novavax said its vaccine was almost 90% effective in protecting against Covid-19 in its phase three trial in the UK, but that it had a muted response in South Africa, with a efficacy rate of only 49.4% among 44 cases in the country. A day later, J&J said its vaccine was 66% effective overall, but only 57% in South Africa, where strain B.1.351 is spreading rapidly.
Gates, whose foundation has donated millions to vaccine research and coronavirus treatment, told CNBC that the two vaccines, which have not yet been authorized for use in the United States, still retain “much capacity. against “variants.
People understand that “there is a reduced effectiveness, although Novavax and Johnson & Johnson still retain a lot of capacity against these variants,” he told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview aired Thursday on “Squawk Box.”
Gates wondered if a third dose of a vaccine would be enough to increase protection against new variants.
“There is a rich dialogue between our foundation, Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and the rest of the government right now on this varying strategy, “said Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as co-founder of Microsoft.
Gates’ comments come as U.S. officials urge Americans to get vaccinated as quickly as possible before potentially new and even more dangerous variants of the virus appear.
As of Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified 1,277 cases of variant B.1.1.7 first identified in the UK. The agency has identified 19 cases of strain B.1.351 from South Africa, as well as three cases of P .1, a variant first identified in Brazil.
The United States must rapidly deploy Covid-19 vaccines and increase genetic sequencing of variants before the virus can mutate again and make the pandemic even worse, the CDC chief said in a paper released Wednesday.
Variant B.1.1.7 has been shown to be highly transmissible and “preliminary data suggest the possibility of increasing the severity of the disease with infection,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky wrote in a research opinion published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA.
Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser and the country’s leading infectious disease expert, has repeatedly said in recent weeks that viruses cannot mutate if they do not have guests to infect and cannot replicate.
Fauci also recently promoted the J&J vaccine, saying that while it appeared to be less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, it was still able to keep people out of the hospital and prevent them from suffering serious illness.
“The most important thing, more important than preventing someone from having sore throats and sores, is to prevent people from ‘suffering from serious illnesses,'” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said in a call journalists on January 29. “This will alleviate both human stress, suffering and death in this epidemic.
Gates also hoped that nations and drug manufacturers will be able to accelerate manufacturing, so there are enough doses to immunize the world. He added that he thought getting shots fired at developing countries would be “the only way to end the pandemic.”