Pfizer begins clinical trials of omicron COVID vaccine: how to determine the end of a pandemic

Pfizer and Biontech began recruitment for clinical trials on the safety and immune response of their specific anticovid vaccine for omicron variant in adults up to 55 years of age, announced a statement on Tuesday.

Albert Bourla, Pfizer's CEO, had previously said that the pharmaceutical giant might be ready to apply for regulatory approval of the vaccine in March.

Pfizer's head of vaccine research, Kathrin Jansen, said that while current data showed that reinforcements of the original vaccine protected against severe forms of omicron, they preferred to act cautiously.

"we recognize the need to be prepared in case this protection decreases over time and potentially help address omicron and new variants in the future," he said.

Ugur Sahin, executive director of the German laboratory Biontech, added that the protection of the original vaccine against mild and moderate covid appeared to decrease more rapidly in the case of omicron.

"this study is part of our scientific approach to developing a vaccine based on variants that achieves a similar level of protection against omicron as it did against previous variants, but with a longer duration of protection."

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The test will involve 1,420 people between 18 and 55 years of age.

Volunteers are divided into three groups.

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The first involves people who received two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine 90 to 180 days before registration and will receive one or two doses of the omicron vaccine.

The second includes people who received three doses of the current vaccine 90 to 180 days before the study and will receive another dose of the original vaccine or a specific omicron vaccine.

The last group consists of people who were never vaccinated against the covid who will receive three doses of the specific omicron vaccine.

Pfizer-BioNTech 's anti-covod vaccine was the first approved in the West in December 2020.

Because it is based on messenger RNA technology, it is relatively easy to update to reflect the genetic code of the new variants.

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Several countries have begun to emerge from the latest wave of contagion caused by omicron, the most transmissible strain to date, although overall cases continue to increase.

The coronavirus leaves about 5.6 million dead in the world since the outbreak in China in December 2019.