AFP

Covid vaccines began to show promise just months after the novel coronavirus started spreading across the globe.

So why have decades of HIV/AIDS research yielded so little progress on a jab to prevent a disease that claimed some 680,000 lives in 2020?

As the globe marks World AIDS Day on Wednesday, why is there still no vaccine to protect people from the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)?

One answer is that the political will and colossal investment that have spurred on Covid vaccine development have largely been missing from AIDS vaccine research since HIV was discovered in 1983. 

But another lies in the complexity of the science behind HIV.

“With COVID vaccines, researchers worry about the vaccine being able to fend off a handful of variants that have become particularly worrisome,” reads a June report by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). 

“But for HIV, there are millions and millions of different viruses that have resulted from the virus’s stealth ability to rapidly mutate… It is this astonishing level of diversity that any HIV vaccine must contend with.”

Olivier Schwartz, head of the viruses and immunity unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, says that while most people can recover naturally from an initial coronavirus infection and thus acquire immunity, this is not the case for HIV.

“HIV mutates much more easily than Covid and so it is more difficult to generate so-called broadly neutralising antibodies that could prevent infection,” he said.

Only a handful of people naturally produce these antibodies when exposed to HIV.

Research into a vaccine has meant studying those rare responses, understanding how they work, and trying to replicate them in healthy people’s immune systems.

– An mRNA jab? –

Several dozen vaccines are being studied, with one by US firm Moderna seeking to use the same mRNA delivery method as its popular Covid vaccine.

The June report describing the research explains how the mRNA jab is meant to deliver instructions for a process called “germline targeting”.

This means “guiding the immune system, step by step, to induce antibodies that can counteract HIV”, the report explains.

So far, the technique is complex, involving an initial shot to activate important B-cells before several jabs attempt to spur the body into producing a range of antibodies.

Being able to visualise a way forward has given researchers hope, and some say it’s thanks in no small part to the pandemic.

“These last few years have seen unprecedented growth in our understanding of the immune system,” Serawit Bruck-Landais of French AIDS organisation Sidaction told AFP.

But even with seeming breakthroughs, Bruck-Landais says, progress on an HIV jab is “not enough to be able to say we will have an AIDS vaccine soon”. 

The US clinical trials for the Moderna vaccine that were set to begin in August are still listed on the National Institutes of Health website as “not recruiting”.

– ‘Lack of investment’ –

Researchers looking into vaccines say they are overlooked in terms of funding.

“The market is too weak for pharmaceutical groups and there’s a disappointing lack of investment,” says Nicolas Manel, a research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). 

“Many researchers are very motivated, but they have to make do with the funds they have.”

In the absence of a vaccine, focus has historically been on promoting preventative measures like protected sex, clean needles, and overall better access to healthcare for marginalised populations.

Some 38 million people across the globe live with the virus.

Monsef Benkirane, research director at the France-based Institute of Human Genetics, points to important improvements in medicine that allow many people with HIV to live longer, healthier lives.

Importantly, by reducing an infected person’s viral load, HIV treatments today can vastly decrease or eliminate a person’s chances of transmitting HIV to another person.

But Benkirane says many people lack access to the treatments, while those who do have access sometimes struggle to follow through and take all the necessary medications.

“In addition to improving access to treatments, there are still problems with people actually sticking to the treatment regimens, even in Europe,” he said.

Existing Covid-19 jabs will struggle against the Omicron variant and it will take months to develop a new shot that works, the head of US vaccine manufacturer Moderna has told the Financial Times.

Stephane Bancel told the newspaper in an interview published Tuesday that data would be available on the effectiveness of current vaccines in the next two weeks but scientists were not optimistic.

“All the scientists I’ve talked to … are like ‘this is not going to be good’,” he told the newspaper.

Bancel’s warning came as G7 health ministers held emergency talks on the new variant, which is spreading around the world and prompting nations to close their borders once again or impose fresh travel restrictions.

The World Health Organization has called the risk from Omicron “very high”.

Bancel said researchers were concerned because 32 of 50 mutations found in the Omicron variant were on the spike protein, a part of the virus that vaccines use to bolster the immune system against Covid.

He told the FT there would be a “material drop” in the effectiveness of current jabs against Omicron.

Moderna has already said it is working on an Omicron-specific vaccine, as is US drugmaker Pfizer.

Chief executive Bancel said his company could deliver between two billion and three billion doses in 2022 but it would be dangerous to shift all production to an Omicron-specific shot with other strains of the virus still in circulation.

His more alarming tone contrasts with efforts by politicians to project calm regarding Omicron.

US President Joe Biden said Monday the strain was “not a cause for panic”.

Existing Covid-19 jabs will struggle against the Omicron variant and it will take months to develop a new shot that works, the head of US vaccine manufacturer Moderna has told the Financial Times.

Stephane Bancel told the newspaper in an interview published Tuesday that data would be available on the effectiveness of current vaccines in the next two weeks but scientists were not optimistic.

“All the scientists I’ve talked to … are like ‘this is not going to be good’,” he told the newspaper.

Bancel’s warning came as G7 health ministers held emergency talks on the new variant, which is spreading around the world and prompting nations to close their borders once again or impose fresh travel restrictions.

The World Health Organization has called the risk from Omicron “very high”.

Bancel said researchers were concerned because 32 of 50 mutations found in the Omicron variant were on the spike protein, a part of the virus that vaccines use to bolster the immune system against Covid.

He told the FT there would be a “material drop” in the effectiveness of current jabs against Omicron.

Moderna has already said it is working on an Omicron-specific vaccine, as is US drugmaker Pfizer.

Chief executive Bancel said his company could deliver between two billion and three billion doses in 2022 but it would be dangerous to shift all production to an Omicron-specific shot with other strains of the virus still in circulation.

His more alarming tone contrasts with efforts by politicians to project calm regarding Omicron.

US President Joe Biden said Monday the strain was “not a cause for panic”.

Across a quarter century of UN climate conferences tasked with saving humanity from itself, one was deemed a chaotic failure (Copenhagen/2009), another a stunning success (Paris/2015), and the rest landed somewhere in between.

This year’s COP26 inspired all these reactions at once.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, leading a 100,000-strong march through the streets of Glasgow, dismissed the two-week meet as a “greenwashing festival”.

But dedicated experts in the negotiating arena hailed solid — even historic — advances in beating back the existential threat of global warming.

More often than not, observers vacillated between approval and criticism, hope and despair.

“The Glasgow Climate Pact is more than we expected, but less than we hoped for,” Dann Mitchell, head of climate hazards at Britain’s Met Office, said with Haiku-like economy.

Gauging the efficacy of measures announced at the COP26 summit largely depends on the yardstick used to measure them.

Compared to what came before, the first-ever call by 196 countries to draw down coal-fired power, or a promise to double financial aid each year — to roughly $40 billion — so poor nations can brace for climate impacts, are giant steps forward. 

Likewise a provision obliging countries to consider setting more ambitious targets for reducing carbon pollution every year rather than once every five years.

But all these hard-won gains at COP26 shrivel in signficance when stacked up against hard science.

– Glasgow exit lane –

An unbroken cascade in 2021 of deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires across four continents, combined with ever more detailed projections, left no doubt that going beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Farenheit) heating limit envisioned in the Paris Agreement would push Earth into the red zone.

“As a lifelong optimist, I see the Glasgow outcome as half-full rather than half-empty,” said Alden Meyer, a senior analyst at climate and energy think tank E3G.

“But the atmosphere responds to emissions — not COP decisions — and much work remains ahead to translate the strong rhetoric here into reality.”

2021 also saw Part 1 of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first comprehensive synthesis of climate science in seven years.

It found that global heating is virtually certain to pass 1.5C, probably within a decade. Meanwhile, ocean levels are rising faster than anticipated, and will do so for centuries.

And forests, soil and oceans — which absorb more than half of humanity’s carbon pollution — show signs of saturation.

Then there is the threat of “tipping points” that could see permafrost release massive amounts of CO2 and methane, the Amazon basin transformed into savannah, and ice sheets shedding enough mass to submerge cities and deltas home to hundreds of millions.

“Make no mistake, we are still on the road to hell,” said Dave Reay, head of the University of Edinburgh’s Climate Change Institute.

“But Glasgow has at least created an exit lane.”

– Permanent breaking story –

Part 2 of the IPCC report on climate impacts, seen exclusively by AFP ahead of its February 2022 publication, reveals another yawning gap between the baby steps of COP26 and what is needed in the long term.

Helping vulnerable nations cope, to the multiplier effect of global heating on extreme weather could soon require trillions of dollars per year, not the tens of billions put on the table at COP26, a draft version of the report makes clear.

“Adaptation costs are significantly higher than previously estimated, resulting in a growing ‘adaptation finance gap’,” said an executive summary of the 4,000-page report.

The failure of rich nations to deliver $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries makes it hard to imagine where these trillions will come from.

Glasgow marked the transition from fleshing out the rules for the 2015 Paris treaty to implementing its provisions. 

But unlike the aftermath of other major COPs, the climate crisis will remain front-and-centre, and this permanent breaking story is not going to recede into the background anytime soon.

How that saga unfolds will depend a lot on the world’s four major emitters, collectively responsible for 60 percent of global carbon pollution.

The United States and the European Union have pledged carbon neutrality by 2050 and recently set more ambitious emissions reduction targets for 2030, but refused to set up a fund demanded by more than 130 developing countries to help pay for climate damage already incurred. 

– All sectors, all countries –

China and India — accounting for 38 percent of global emissions in 2021, and rising — have resisted pressure to foreswear fossil fuels.

Beijing has steadfastly refused to do what scientists say is doable and necessary to stay under 2C: peak their emissions far earlier than 2030.

If climate politics remain stymied, however, global capital is already flowing into what some have called the most massive economic transformation in human history. 

In Glasgow, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney boasted that nearly 500 banks, insurers and asset managers worth $130 trillion were ready to finance climate action.

“If we only had to transform one sector, or move one country off fossil fuels, we would have done so long ago,” commented Christiana Figueres, who headed the UN climate convention when the Paris deal was struck.

“But all sectors of the global economy have to be decarbonised, and all countries must switch to clean technologies.”    

Where some of that money might flow — and who might get left out — has also come into focus, with major investment deals announced for South Africa, and others in the pipeline for emerging economies such as Indonesia and Vietnam.

But there is little incentive for private capital to help the poorest and most climate vulnerable countries to cope with climate ravages and shore up their defences.

“We cannot just wait for open market incentives to have their way, we need to set prices on carbon globally, we need to set science-based targets that become climate laws,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. 

The world could see the Covid pandemic begin fading next year into an endemic disease like others humanity lives with, unless glaring inequality in vaccine access drags it out and worse variants emerge.

Even as countries scramble to address a new worrying virus variant and Europe battles a winter resurgence, health experts say that taming the pandemic over the next year is possible.

All the know-how and tools needed to bring the virus under control exist, with ballooning stocks of safe and effective vaccines and new treatments becoming available.

But it remains unclear if we will make the hard choices needed, or allow the pandemic to continue to rage, potentially opening the way to a far worse situation.

“The trajectory of this pandemic is in our hands,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s top expert on the Covid crisis, told reporters recently.

Can we “reach a state where we have gained control over transmission in 2022? Absolutely,” she said. “We could have done that already, but we haven’t.”

A year after the first vaccines came to market, more than 7.5 billion doses have been administered globally.

And the world is on track to produce some 24 billion doses by next June — more than enough for everyone on the planet.

But a dire lack of vaccines in poorer countries and resistance among some to get jabs where they are available have left nations vulnerable as new, more transmissible variants like Delta have sparked wave after wave of infection.

And so the scenes of intubated patients in overcrowded hospitals and long lines of people scrambling to find oxygen for loved ones have continued.

Images of improvised funeral pyres burning across a Delta-hit India have epitomised the human cost of the pandemic.

Officially, more than 5.1 million people have died worldwide, although the WHO says that the actual toll is likely two to three times that figure.

In the United States, which remains the worst-affected country with close to 800,000 deaths, the constant flow of short obituaries on the FacesOfCovid Twitter account include many who did not have the jab.

“Amanda, a 36-year-old math teacher in Kentucky. Chris, a 34-year-old high school football coach in Kansas. Cherie, a 40-year-old 7th-grade reading teacher in Illinois. All had an impact in their communities. All deeply loved. All unvaccinated,” read a recent post.

– ‘Part of the furniture’ –

Two years after the virus first surfaced in China, countries are still bouncing between opening up and reimposing restrictions.

Anti-vax protests are rocking a number of countries in Europe, once again the pandemic epicentre, amid fresh lockdowns and looming mandatory vaccination.

Despite such scenes, many experts suggest the pandemic phase will soon be over.

Covid will not fully disappear, but will become a largely controlled endemic disease that we will learn to live with, like the flu, they say.

It will basically “become part of the furniture”, Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California in Irvine, told AFP.

Top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has also said increased vaccination should soon get us to a point where Covid “might occasionally be up and down in the background but it won’t dominate us the way it’s doing right now”.

– ‘Myopic’ –

But glaring inequity in vaccine access remains a towering challenge. 

About 65 percent of people in high-income countries have had at least one vaccine dose, but just over seven percent in low-income countries, UN numbers show.

Branding the imbalance a moral outrage, the WHO has urged wealthy countries to refrain from providing booster shots to the fully vaccinated until the most vulnerable everywhere have received their first jabs — but to no avail.

Health experts stress that allowing Covid to spread unabated in some places dramatically increases the chances that new, more dangerous variants could emerge, placing the entire world at risk.

Putting such fears even more in focus was the emergence last week of Omicron, a new concerning Covid variant first detected in southern Africa.

The WHO has warned it poses a “very high” risk globally, although it remains unclear if it is more contagious, dangerous or better at dodging vaccine protections than previous variants.

“No one is safe until everyone is safe,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeated since the start of the pandemic.

Gautam Menon, a physics and biology professor at Ashoka University in India, agreed it was in the best interests of wealthy countries to ensure poorer nations also get jabs.

“It would be myopic to assume that just by vaccinating themselves they have gotten rid of the problem,” he said.

– Double pandemic? –

If the world fails to address the imbalance, experts warn the worst could still lie ahead.

One nightmare scenario depicted by the WHO envisions the Covid pandemic left to rage out of control amid a steady barrage of new, more dangerous variants, even as a separate Zika-like mosquito-borne virus sparks a parallel pandemic.

Confusion, disinformation and migration crises sparked by people fleeing mosquito-prone areas would shrink trust in authorities and science, as health systems collapse and political turmoil ensues.

This is one of several “plausible” scenarios, according to WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan.

“The double-pandemic one is of particular concern, because we have one virus causing a pandemic now, and many others lined up.”

The WHO is urging countries to commit to a pandemic treaty to help prepare for and prevent future crises.

“This is certainly not the last dangerous pathogenic virus that we are going to experience,” said Jamie Metzl, a technology and healthcare futurist.

Regardless of how the Covid situation evolves, “it’s clear that we can’t ever have a complete demobilisation”. 

Thick grey dust hangs in the air and vast chasms are gouged into the land in the Indian coal hub of Singrauli, where giant machines scoop up dirty fuel to power the country’s growth while worsening its pollution blight.

The open-cast mines of Singrauli epitomise the economic and environmental dilemma faced by the world’s second-most populous nation, which led the opposition to phasing out coal at this month’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

India’s resistance on the issue is driven by its desire to distribute the benefits of development more widely among its 1.3 billion people, some of whom still have no access to electricity.

But it comes at a heavy price.

In Singrauli, home to more than a dozen mines and coal-fired power stations, dark soot covers trees, houses, cars and even cows.

In scenes reminiscent of a dystopian movie, sticky sludge lines the roads, while trucks, trains and ropeway cars carry huge mounds of coal and spill black dust on passers-by.

Residents have little choice but to breathe in the acrid air that stings the eyes and throats.

“Our air, water and in fact the entire environment is heavily polluted. Even the cows look like buffaloes here,” said Sanjay Namdev, a labour union activist, as cranes and dumpers whirred behind him at a sprawling coal yard.

“But forget phasing out, you cannot even phase down coal in a country like India,” he told AFP. “Millions of people depend on coal for cheap electricity and I don’t see that stopping ever.”

– A/C and fridges –

As Asia’s third-biggest economy grows, its hunger for coal is mounting, with aspirational middle classes needing electricity to run their air conditioners and refrigerators. 

Coal consumption in India has already doubled in the last decade — only China burns more — and the fuel powers 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid.

With international pressure mounting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month announced India would aim to be carbon-neutral only by 2070 — a decade after China and 20 years after the world’s other big emitters.

The government argues that although the country is the world’s third-largest emitter in total, its per capita emissions are far lower than the American average.

Around 30,000 people are employed in the Singrauli mines, with thousands more working as casual labourers, and fear they have no future without coal, even as climate change brings them hotter summers and heavy unseasonal rains.

“You can see how bad the pollution situation is here. I know it is bad for my health but what will I do if the coal mines shut down? How will I feed my children?” said mineworker Vinod Kumar, whose haggard looks belied his 31 years.

Northern Coalfields, a state-run mining firm, owns over 80 percent of the coal assets in Singrauli, producing 130 million tonnes of the fuel annually, and says it is trying to make its operations less polluting.

“We want to make coal dispatch completely eco-friendly,” said company spokesman Ram Vijay Singh. “We also hold free camps every year to screen health problems among the locals.”

But activists say such piecemeal measures serve no real purpose.

“There are some machines and techniques that can cut down the pollution but the companies are not serious about these,” said Namdev.

“There are so many anti-pollution guidelines but these are flouted with impunity. All they are concerned about is making quick profits.”

– Begging for jobs –

Across India, more than 13 million people are employed in coal mining and related sectors, according to Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty Initiative, a campaign group.

“An abrupt coal phase-out in India may lead to economic disruption,” he said. “In a country where a large population depends on coal for their income and energy, we must ensure social justice in the shift towards a fossil fuel-free future.”

And for some Singrauli residents, their biggest complaint is that they are not profiting from the environmental carnage around them.

Casual labourer and part-time liquor distiller Uma Devi, 50, lives in a thatched mud house on the edge of a coal mine owned by Reliance, an Indian conglomerate headed by Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani.

“We have been begging them to give us jobs for two years but they don’t listen to us,” she said. “They have brought people from outside to work for them.

“Each time blasting happens, it shatters our eardrums. The government is making money off them but we are getting nothing in return except the pollution.”

She cannot afford the 900-rupee ($12) cost of a gas cylinder, so every day she cooks her family’s food on a fire made with scavenged coal.

Pfizer has already started working on a version of its Covid-19 vaccine specifically targeting the new Omicron variant in case the current inoculation is not effective against the latest strain, the US drugmaker’s CEO Albert Bourla said Monday.

Bourla told CNBC that his company on Friday began testing the current vaccine against the Omicron variant, which was first reported in South Africa and has reignited fears of a global wave of Covid-19 infections.

“I don’t think the result will be the vaccines don’t protect,” Bourla said. 

But the testing could show that existing shots “protect less,” which would mean “that we need to create a new vaccine,” Bourla said. 

“Friday we made our first DNA template, which is the first possible inflection of the development process of a new vaccine,” he said.

Johnson & Johnson also said Monday that it is “pursuing an Omicron-specific variant vaccine and will progress it as needed.”

On Friday, Moderna, another leading Covid-19 vaccine maker, said it was developing a booster shot against the new variant.

Bourla likened the situation to the scenario earlier this year when Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech developed a vaccine in 95 days when there were concerns the previous formula would not work against Delta, though that version ultimately was not used. 

The current vaccine is “very effective” against Delta, the executive said, adding that the companies expect to be able to produce four billion vaccine doses in 2022.

On Monday, the World Health Organization warned the new Covid-19 Omicron variant poses a “very high” risk globally.

Bourla said he was also “very confident” that Pfizer’s recently unveiled antiviral pill would work as a treatment for infections caused by the mutations, including Omicron. 

Among newly-infected, high risk patients treated within three days of the onset of symptoms, Pfizer’s pill has been shown to cut hospitalization or death by nearly 90 percent.

G7 health ministers on Monday called for “urgent action” to combat the newly identified Omicron Covid-19 variant spreading across the world as US President Joe Biden said the strain is “not a cause for panic”.

Australia and Japan led the growing list of countries imposing fresh travel restrictions or slamming shut their borders as the new strain identified last week spreads rapidly to Europe, Asia and North America.

However Biden told Americans he did not foresee new lockdowns or extending travel restrictions for now because of Omicron.

While no deaths have yet been reported from Omicron, and it remains unclear how infectious and how resistant the strain may prove to vaccines, its emergence underscores how besieged the world remains by Covid-19, nearly two years after the first cases were recorded.

Many governments, particularly in western Europe, had already struggled with rapid rises in cases and have reintroduced mandatory mask-wearing, social-distancing measures, curfews or lockdowns — leaving businesses fearing another grim Christmas.

Following emergency talks, G7 health ministers said “the global community is faced with the threat of a new, at a first evaluation, highly transmissible variant of COVID-19, which requires urgent action.”

The World Health Organization said the overall risk from Omicron was “very high” and warned that any major surge would put pressure on health systems and cause more deaths.

– ‘More tools’ –

“If another major surge of Covid-19 takes place driven by Omicron, consequences may be severe,” the WHO cautioned, concluding that “the overall global risk related to the new VOC (variant of concern) Omicron is assessed as very high.”

Scientists in South Africa said they had detected the new variant with at least 10 mutations, compared with three for Beta or two for Delta — the strain that hit the global recovery and sent millions worldwide back into lockdown.

However, South African doctor Angelique Coetzee, who raised the alarm over Omicron, said the cases she saw suggested the symptoms were milder than other variants.

Biden stressed that the United States was in a good position to control Omicron’s spread. 

“We have more tools today to fight the variant than we’ve ever had before,” he said, adding that his chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci expects current vaccines to work against the new variant, with boosters enhancing protection.

US drugmaker Pfizer and the backers of Russian vaccine Sputnik V said separately they were working on versions of their Covid-19 vaccines targeting Omicron, while US pharmaceutical company Moderna had said on Friday that it would develop a booster shot against the variant.

The announcement of the new variant sent stock markets and oil prices tumbling last week, however they have rebounded somewhat since.

US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Monday that Omicron could slow the recovery of the US economy and labour market, and heighten uncertainty regarding inflation.

– ‘Should not be penalised’ –

Omicron has prompted some countries to tighten border controls.

On Monday, Japan joined Israel in announcing plans to bar all new foreign travellers. Australia announced it was delaying by two weeks the relaxation of restrictions that would have allowed skilled workers and foreign students to enter.

The growing list of countries to impose travel curbs on southern Africa includes Britain, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

“The people of Africa cannot be blamed for the immorally low level of vaccinations available in Africa — and they should not be penalised for identifying and sharing crucial science and health information with the world,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

China’s President Xi Jinping on Monday pledged Africa one billion Covid vaccine doses as the continent struggles to acquire enough jabs to immunise against the disease. 

The first confirmed case of the Omicron variant was in South Africa on November 9, with infections spreading rapidly in the country.

With the spread of the new variant and rising cases overall, governments are struggling to enforce new measures.

Dutch police arrested a couple who fled a quarantine hotel and boarded a flight to Spain, despite one of them having tested positive for Covid.

And populations are continuing to rebel — tens of thousands took to the streets in Austria over the weekend to object to mandatory vaccinations.

burs/jm/pbr/dl

Pfizer has already started working on a version of its Covid-19 vaccine specifically targeting the new Omicron variant in case the current inoculation is not effective against the latest strain, the US drugmaker’s CEO Albert Bourla said Monday.

Bourla told CNBC that his company on Friday began testing the current vaccine against the Omicron variant, which was first reported in South Africa and has reignited fears of a global wave of Covid-19 infections.

“I don’t think the result will be the vaccines don’t protect,” Bourla said. 

But the testing could show that existing shots “protect less,” which would mean “that we need to create a new vaccine,” Bourla said. 

“Friday we made our first DNA template, which is the first possible inflection of the development process of a new vaccine,” he said.

Johnson & Johnson also said Monday that it is “pursuing an Omicron-specific variant vaccine and will progress it as needed.”

On Friday, Moderna, another leading Covid-19 vaccine maker, said it was developing a booster shot against the new variant.

Bourla likened the situation to the scenario earlier this year when Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech developed a vaccine in 95 days when there were concerns the previous formula would not work against Delta, though that version ultimately was not used. 

The current vaccine is “very effective” against Delta, the executive said, adding that the companies expect to be able to produce four billion vaccine doses in 2022.

On Monday, the World Health Organization warned the new Covid-19 Omicron variant poses a “very high” risk globally.

Bourla said he was also “very confident” that Pfizer’s recently unveiled antiviral pill would work as a treatment for infections caused by the mutations, including Omicron. 

Among newly-infected, high risk patients treated within three days of the onset of symptoms, Pfizer’s pill has been shown to cut hospitalization or death by nearly 90 percent.

The world must study the wreckage of Covid-19 and say “never again” by striking a pandemic preparedness treaty, the WHO said Monday as countries gathered to build the foundations of a new accord.

World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said another disastrous pandemic was bound to happen unless countries showed the resolve to strengthen global defences.

Nations are meeting in Geneva from Monday to Wednesday to discuss an international agreement setting out how to handle the next pandemic — which experts fear is only a matter of time.

The gathering comes with the planet still besieged by Covid-19, nearly two years on from the first cases recorded in China, and now shaken by Omicron, the new Covid variant of concern.

WHO member states reached a consensus Sunday on kick-starting the process towards a pandemic treaty.

The draft decision was secured after countries agreed to compromise — notably the United States, which is luke-warm on whether the outcome needs to be a legally-binding treaty.

The decision is expected to be formalised on Wednesday.

– Shadow of Omicron –

“The emergence of the highly-mutated Omicron variant underlines just how perilous and precarious our situation is,” Tedros told world leaders at the start of the three-day gathering.

“Omicron demonstrates just why the world needs a new accord on pandemics.

“Omicron’s very emergence is another reminder that although many of us might think we’re done with Covid-19, it’s not done with us.

“It will all happen again unless you, the nations of the world, can come together to say with one voice: never again.”

This meeting of the World Health Assembly — the WHO’s decision-making body comprising all 194 member states — is an unprecedented special session on how to handle the next pandemic.

It should thrash out how far countries are prepared to go towards legally-binding commitments on issues like equitable vaccine distribution, knowledge-sharing, financing and oversight structures, with any final deal due to come into force in 2024.

A key issue down the line could be whether countries want beefed-up powers for the WHO to investigate the sources of outbreaks. Tedros said the lack of data-sharing early in the Covid pandemic had been a hindrance.

“One of the expectations of this treaty is to be able to improve the WHO’s capacity to monitor and assess the situation in countries: the investigative power of WHO,” a French diplomatic source said.

– ‘Make history’ –

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said the world was unprepared for Covid-19 and “for that weakness, we all paid a great price.”

“Steps must be taken to ensure that this will not happen again, that when the next pandemic comes, and it will come, it will find us better prepared,” he said.

Under the draft decision, WHO member states agree to establish an intergovernmental negotiating body “to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”.

The body’s first meeting must be no later than March 1 next year to elect two co-chairs and four vice-chairs.

A progress report will be presented at the regular World Health Assembly annual gathering in 2023, with the final outcome presented for consideration at the 2024 WHA.

European Council President Charles Michel, who first got the ball rolling on a pandemic treaty, said: “I hope we will make history. The situation in the world demands it.

“Yesterday’s informal agreement is a huge step, and now it’s time to capitalise on this momentum to make the world a safer place.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for reform of how countries fund the WHO so it can react more flexibly to crises. 

“Measures for better prevention and response to pandemics should be laid down in a pandemic treaty, binding under international law,” she said. 

Swiss Health Minister Alain Berset said the world needed to take immediate, bold action, as he called for a legally-binding instrument.

“The issues at stake are too important. We don’t have the right to fail,” he said.