“Even those who have had three shots of the vaccine can still pass on Covid.” So says Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of pharmaceutical giant BioNTech, the German company that, together with Pfizer, launched one of the most effective corona vaccines on the market. At the same time, Sahin is optimistic about the first results from the field in South Africa and England. In the French newspaper Le Monde he calls it “reassuring”.
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“Preliminary data from the UK show efficacy of approximately 70 percent after the third dose and approximately 20 to 40 percent after the second dose,” said BioNTech’s CEO. Le Monde. Although, according to a new study from Imperial College London, the latter figure is even below 20 percent.
But the vaccines protect against serious disease much better, South African data also show, up to “70 percent after two doses, which I think is still a slight underestimate,” Sahin said. According to him, the control group is “probably better protected than the average population”, because many South Africans have already contracted an infection. “I’m now waiting for the next UK real-world data on this.”
Sahin prefers data from the field to that from the lab to determine the protective power of the vaccines. He also does not want to comment on how quickly the effectiveness decreases. A German study spoke of an effectiveness of just 25 percent after three months, even after three doses. “Clearly we are a long way from the 95 percent effectiveness we had against the original virus,” Sahin admits. “But after the third injection, our vaccine appears to provide 70 to 75 percent protection against any form of the disease, which is still a good overall outcome for a vaccine. And I think we will be way above that for the more serious forms of disease.”
Omikron vaccine
The CEO realizes that we will not get there with his vaccine alone, because “even those who have been vaccinated three times can still pass on the disease”. He therefore finds testing important, especially in the surroundings of vulnerable people. Additional corona measures must be observed during the winter, Sahin emphasizes, in order to control the rapid spread of the omikron variant.
Also in the French newspaper, Sahin repeats that his company is working on a modified vaccine that will use the spike protein and its 32 mutations as an antigen. Because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, this can happen quickly. “We are well on our schedule of 100 days,” said Sahin. “Subject to approval, we should be able to deliver the first omikron vaccines by March.” According to the CEO and immunologist, the spike protein remains essential in the development of the vaccine, although BioNTech is also investigating other parts of the virus to possibly add them as additional targets.
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