Covid Vaccine Is Growing Less Effective, but Still Prevents Severe Disease: BioNTech

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The protection provided by

Pfizer

and

BioNTech’s

Covid-19 vaccine is dropping due to the Delta variant, BioNTech’s CEO told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Sunday, but most recipients are still protected against severe disease caused by the virus.

“The vaccine protection against the new variant is considerably lower,” BioNTech (ticker: BNTX) CEO
Dr. Ugur Sahin
told the Journal.

He said, however, that even though the protection against all symptomatic disease is dropping, protection against severe disease remains high, and most people may not yet need a third dose.

Read more: Will We Need Booster Shots? Study Raises Doubts

Sahin declined to take a position in the Journal interview on whether governments should authorize a booster dose of its vaccine. BioNTech’s partner

Pfizer

(PFE) has said it plans to ask the U.S. government to authorize a booster dose.

“This debate must proceed without us: We will only supply data and governments will need to tell us what they want,” Sahin told the Journal.

Read more: With Cases Rising, Travel’s Rebound Faces a Big Test

BioNTech shares were up 4% on Monday, and the stock is up 260% so far this year. Pfizer was flat, and is up 13.2% this year. The

S&P 500

was down 0.1%.

In recent weeks, as new cases of Covid-19 have climbed around the world, Pfizer has begun to push for authorization of a third dose of the vaccine. Health officials in Israel, meanwhile, have reported that the efficacy of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine at protecting against all symptomatic Covid-19 has dropped to 40.5% as Delta has become dominant in the country, though protection against hospitalization remains high, at 88%.

Read More: The Market for Booster Vaccines Just Keeps Getting Bigger

Federal health officials in the U.S. pushed back in mid-July against Pfizer’s assertion that it would submit a booster dose of its vaccine for emergency authorization. But late last week, a key advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signaled early support for recommending a booster dose for immunocompromised people.

The World Health Organization’s director general, meanwhile, said last week that the world had squandered Covid-19 vaccines by failing to distribute them more equally around the world, and called the notion of administering booster shots a “moral outrage.”

“Some of the richest countries are now talking about third booster shots for their populations, while health-workers, older people, and other vulnerable groups in the rest of the world continue to go without,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom last Wednesday. “This is not just a moral outrage; it’s also epidemiologically and economically self-defeating. The longer this discrepancy persists, the longer the pandemic will drag on.”

Read more: Rising Covid Cases Put Economic Recovery at Risk

BioNTech’s Sahin has long warned that boosters could be necessary. He told Barron’s for a feature published in April that patients may need to be redosed with the vaccine six to nine months after their second dose, and then every 12 to 18 months after that. And in an interview at Barron’s Investing in Tech conference in June, he said that antibody responses in people who had received the vaccine were stable for four or five months after the second dose, and then at six months the antibody levels begin to drop. Redosing boosts those levels again.

“At the end of the day it’s also a decision of the governments when to introduce the booster shot for the population,” Sahin said in June.

In his comments to the Journal, BioNTech’s Sahin also said that he was staying out of the debate over whether countries should authorize booster doses. 

“When the vaccine becomes available on the free market everyone will be able to make this decision for themselves,” he said.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com