Pharmaceutical giant Moderna announced on Wednesday that it will continue to test a number of booster shots for its original two-shot vaccine, including one that it is specifically targeted at the B1351, or “South African” variant, of the Covid-19 virus.

During a segment on CNN, anchor Wolf Blitzer and public health expert Dr. Ashish Jha discussed the development of singing out this mutation, which has proven to be particularly more virulent than the original virus as well as somewhat more resistant to the current vaccine arsenal.

“Moderna exploring new strategies to tackle the South African Covid variant including a variant-specific booster shot, a booster shot of the standard vaccine or combined booster shot,” Blitzer noted. “Which of those symptoms from your perspective would make the most sense?”

“I do think these booster shots are going to potentially end up playing an important role,” Jha said. “Even the current vaccines do prevent — do seem to work against the South Africa variant. But having a booster specifically targeted toward that I think can be quite helpful.”

“But there’s a broader point here, which is as long as we’re seeing large outbreaks happening in other parts of the world we’re going to constantly be chasing our tail,” Jha explained. “We’re going to have to be coming up with boosters all the time. So the best way to put this pandemic behind us is to have a global strategy that gets everybody vaccinated so we can move on from this horrible pandemic.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

 

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