Dr. Drew Weissman from the University of Pennsylvania talks about how scientists can adapt COVID-19 vaccines to combat new coronavirus variants.
and now to the latest on the pandemic covet cases and hospitalizations are dropping sharply across the country as more than one million americans have been vaccinated daily for the last 12 days but concerns are growing over new virus variants dr anthony fauci says they should be our top concern in the u.s and that the next six weeks will be critical in preventing their spread so will current vaccines protect against these new mutations let’s bring in dr drew weissman he’s a professor of medicine at the university of pennsylvania who developed the mrna vaccine platform used by the pfizer and moderna vaccine dr weissman good morning thank you or good afternoon i should say thank you for being here when it comes to trying to adjust for these new variants how feasible is it to manipulate the current vaccines if you find they don’t protect as well against these new mutations so we’re not at that point yet the vaccines still work uh the worry is that they soon or in the future they may not for the rna vaccine it’s very simple you simply exchange a new antigen a new spike protein in the mrna and produce it according to uber sahin [Music] that will take them six weeks before it will be ready to give to patients so that’s incredibly quick so it’s easier it sounds like to manipulate the the mrna vaccines this new version of vaccines then it would be to do the same with if these vaccines were done in a more traditional format it would because making the rna is quick and it’s simple whereas these other platforms would require more optimization more testing more development and so what kind of work is being done right now to try to make sure that these vaccines continue to be effective so i i know that both moderna and biontech pfizer are already working on a potential booster vaccine that will cover the south africa and other variants now we have already seen some hiccups in vaccine distribution and administration here in the u.s so is vaccine distribution infrastructure prepared to administer not only the initial versions of the vaccine but then also any future booster shots we might need so that’s actually a good question we’re certainly improving the the amount of vaccine the ability to distribute it to give it to patients is improving from week to week and i believe it’s going to continue to improve now a peer-reviewed study released today found that russia’s vaccine is over 91 effective could we start to see that vaccine used here in the u.s um i mean that’s great for a vaccine efficacy i don’t know where the russians are going to distribute it all right and and lastly dr weissman there we know that there is a lot of mistrust in vaccines in general particularly these because it’s a new virus and a new vaccine but one of the concerns is that the mrna platform itself is new and that has people worried what do you say to people who who worry about that aspect of the vaccine so it’s not new technology we’ve been working on mrna for 30 years we’ve been working on mrna vaccines that are essentially identical to the covid vaccines for about the past nine or ten years they’ve been in people for over six years this is not a brand new vaccine it’s well established technology the vaccine has been shown to be incredibly safe and very very effective all right dr drew weissman from upenn we appreciate your time and your work thank you thank you hi everyone george stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the abc news youtube channel if you’d like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel and don’t forget to download the abc news app for breaking news alerts thanks for watching
