Staff Reporter.
The head of BioNTech SE, the German company that developed the first Covid-19 vaccine, said a new formula is likely to be needed by mid-2022 to protect against future mutations of the virus.
Ugur Sahin, co-founder and chief executive officer of BioNtech, told the Financial Times that while current variants of Covid-19, such as the contagious delta strain, were not different enough to undermine current vaccinations, new strains will emerge that can evade booster shots and the body’s immune defenses.
This year [a different vaccine] is completely unneeded, but by mid-next year, it could be a different situation,” he said. “This is a continuous evolution, and that evolution has just started.”
BioNTech partnered with U.S. pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer Inc to develop its Covid-19 vaccine. Last month, the companies submitted initial data to U.S. regulators about the use of the vaccine in children aged 5 to 11, one step closer to bringing shots to school-age kids.
Meanwhile overall, China and India have administered the highest number of doses, with about 2.2 billion and 886 million respectively. The US ranks third, with more than 392 million.
But when breaking the figures down by doses per 100 people in countries with a population of at least one million, the United Arab Emirates, Cuba and Uruguay top the list.
Covid-19 was first detected in the city of Wuhan, China, in late 2019 but the outbreak spread quickly across the globe in the first months of 2020.
It was declared a global pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020.
A pandemic is when an infectious disease is passing easily from person to person in many parts of the world at the same time.