Excerpt:
Moderna Inc. said it has made the initial batch of doses of a new Covid-19 vaccine designed to better protect people against a new strain of the coronavirus that has shown some resistance to the company’s original vaccine.
The Cambridge, Mass., company on Wednesday said it shipped the new shots to the National Institutes of Health to conduct the first human study of the variant vaccine, which could start within weeks.
The new vaccine, code-named mRNA-1273.351, is designed to better match the virus variant that was first identified in South Africa but has since spread elsewhere.
Moderna, which makes the second Covid-19 shot authorized in the U.S., might be the first vaccine maker to have finished the laboratory work of designing a shot targeting variants that started spreading swiftly late last year.
Author(s): Peter Loftus
Publication Date: 24 February 2021
Publication Site: Wall Street Journal