Covid-19: Moderna plans booster doses to counter variants

Abstract

In an interview with The BMJ earlier this month Andrew Pollard, a leader of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine trials, explained that modifying the vaccine was not complicated. “For the RNA vaccines and the viral vectors it’s relatively straightforward, because you just have to synthesise a new bit of DNA in our case—or RNA in [the Pfizer andModerna] cases—and then insert that into the new vaccine. Then there’s a bit of work to do to manufacture the new vaccine, which is a reasonably heavy lift. But the same processes would be used.”2