Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Tuesday that, at some point in the future, a strain of COVID-19 that is resistant to vaccines is likely to emerge.
“Every time that the variant appears in the world, our scientists are getting their hands around it,” Bourla told Fox News in an interview. “They are researching to see if this variant can escape the protection of our vaccine. We haven’t identified any yet but we believe that it is likely that one day, one of them will emerge.”
This is not the first time Bourla has made the ominous prediction. He addressed the issue in a wide-ranging interview with Fortune in February, around the time when attention was increasingly turning to new mutations of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19.
Responding to a question about the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against emerging variants, Bourla said he was “quite confident” it could neutralize the new mutations and cited encouraging lab results. At the same time, he said that “the fundamental question” is how likely it is that there will eventually emerge a vaccine-resistant strain of coronavirus.
“Theoretically, it’s a very possible scenario. If you protect a very big part of the population, and if there is a strain that emerges that can use this pool of population to replicate while the current strains cannot, obviously this will overtake the original. So it’s not a certainty, but it is now, I believe, a likely scenario,” he said.
At the time, Bourla told Fortune that the mRNA technology used in the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine allows for the rapid development of a new version able to create a different immunogenicity that could cover new mutations. He predicted that such a vaccine could be developed in around two months but noted this would depend on multiple factors including the regulatory framework.
By Tom Ozimek
