New vaccination?
Biontech and Pfizer await approval for alternative vaccine
Created: 08/27/2022, 10:49 p.m
Doctor puts syringe in upper arm © IMAGO/Wolfgang Maria Weber
In order to take more targeted action against omicron variants, Biontech and Pfizer want to bring out a new vaccine.
A decision on admission will be made in September.
Mainz - News about other vaccines to combat the corona virus: Biontech and Pfizer have completed their application for approval for a corona vaccine adapted to the current Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 at the European Medicines Agency EMA.
As the Mainz-based company and its US partner announced on Friday, half of the vaccine candidate consists of the previous vaccine Comirnaty and the other half of a messenger molecule (mRNA) that is tailored to the spike protein of subtypes BA.4/5.
Except for this addition, all other components of the vaccine are unchanged.
Coronavirus: decision will be made on September 1st
According to the two manufacturers, pre-clinical data showed that a booster vaccination with the BA.4/5-adapted agent elicited a "strong neutralizing antibody response" against these subtypes as well as against subtypes BA.1/2 and the original wild-type strain.
In addition to preclinical, quality and manufacturing data, the application is based on data from a phase 2/3 study of the BA.1 matched vaccine candidate.
The companies had already submitted an application for approval for this vaccine candidate in July.
BA.1 no longer plays a role in Germany.
The EMA recently announced that the responsible committee wants to decide on September 1st about the applications from Biontech/Pfizer and the US company Moderna for approval of their vaccines adapted to the BA.1 subtype.
At the same time, the EMA is already testing the vaccine from Biontech/Pfizer that has been adapted to BA.4/5.
Biontech and Pfizer had already applied to the US drug agency FDA for emergency approval for the corona vaccine adapted to BA.4/5 on Monday.
Corona virus: Lauterbach fears difficult times
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach believes that Germany is facing difficult times due to the increasing number of corona in autumn.
With the omicron subvariant BA.5, at least at the beginning of autumn, there will be an increase in the number of cases, the SPD politician told the
world on Sunday
.
“There will then be failures in the companies and the critical infrastructure, for example in hospitals.
So we have difficult times ahead of us.” This is especially the case when staying indoors due to winter temperatures becomes the norm.
(dpa)