Moderna Chairman Warns Against ‘Putting Our Guard Down’ on Covid
Moderna Chairman Warns Against ‘Putting Our Guard Down’ on Covid
(Bloomberg) -- Moderna Inc.’s chairman vowed to keep testing the drugmaker’s Covid-19 vaccine on variants and advised against “putting our guard down” as mutations emerge.
The new strains stem from “a natural process but it is concerning,” Noubar Afeyan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “We really don’t know where these variants are going to go.”
Moderna on Tuesday reported that its vaccine produced protective antibodies against the delta variant, which is causing concern in the U.S. and many other parts of the world. The stock surged to a record.
One crucial lesson gleaned from the past year and a half is to ensure the world doesn’t slip back into “reactive mode,” according to Afeyan.
“We’ve been gaining advantage over this virus -- that really is kind of gunning for our immune system constantly -- by being proactive, by being preventive,” he said. “We can’t get to a point where we wait for another sort of variant to really do damage and then start saying ‘now what do we do.’”
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