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Moderna said Monday it’s accelerating work on a Covid-19 booster shot to guard against the recently discovered variant in South Africa. The company’s researchers said its current coronavirus vaccine appears to work against the two highly transmissible strains found in the U.K. and South Africa, although it looks like it may be less effective against the latter. (Lovelace Jr., 1/25)

Moderna Inc. said its Covid-19 vaccine appeared to protect against emerging variants of the coronavirus in laboratory tests, but as a precaution it would test whether a booster shot improves immune responses and develop a new vaccine targeting the strain first identified in South Africa. The company said Monday its vaccine produced immune-system agents known as neutralizing antibodies that worked against the emerging virus variants tested, including strains first evident in the U.K. and South Africa. (Loftus, 1/25)

Moderna said the development of the booster is a precaution because its already-authorized two-dose regimen still offered substantial protection against the U.K. and South African strains in the lab study. “As we seek to defeat the COVID-19 virus, which has created a worldwide pandemic, we believe it is imperative to be proactive as the virus evolves,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. The company is starting human trials for the South African booster shot “out of abundance of caution,” he added. (Owermohle, 1/25)

Moderna said it also planned to begin testing whether giving patients a third shot of its original vaccine as a booster could help fend off newly emerging forms of the virus. (Grady, Mandavilli and Thomas, 1/25)