Ask Moderna News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Reporting. last hour i spoke with moderna's chief medical officer dr. paul burton and asked him why officials are already worried the omicron variant could elude the protection of some of the vaccines. >> just a shout-out to the whole covid community around the world that's really been able to sequence this variant and provide amazing information to the world so quickly. it's an amazing feat. the network for genomics surveillance in south africa, for example. what they show is that this is -- >> here we see president biden is answering a new questions as he -- as he gets his travel under way...

Joining us. what is your reaction to what you just heard from moderna's chief medical officer? >> with everything around omicron the answer to many of his questions as well we just don't know. what i really want to do is just take a second for all of us to take a deep breath. there's a lot of hype. there's a lot of panic. there's a lot of fear. some of it may be justified, but the -- the thing is that we're just not going to know for a few weeks. we have people right now at the world health organization, the amazing scientists in south africa that were transparent that did this work, they are ...

Vaccine inequity and moderna is one of the companies that has been prioritizing its pharmaceutical profits over getting the rest world vaccinated. for example, in botswana, they were paying -- botswana was one of the countries where the genomic sequence for this new variant was discovered. paying one of the highest prices in the world, nearly double watch we're paying in the u.s. and the delivery of their vaccine from moderna was delayed by many months meaning over a third of people in botswana right now are vaccinated. we know unvaccinated populations give the voyeurs places to mutate and cre...

Against a variant like this? >> yes. so, paula, moderna, we've been testing variant specific boosters and vaccines over the summer, one to the beta variant, one to the delta. our platform we can move very fast. we think within, you know, weeks to maybe two to three months we would be able to have an omicron specific vaccine booster available for test willing and then for administration, so, you know, this is going to go at the fastest possible speed, but we have to do careful science now. we don't want to misstep . the academic community around the world need to generate data that we can make ...