Moderna surges after it announces that Omicron vaccine will be ready early 2022

[LONDON] Moderna Inc shares jumped 11 percent in US pre-market trading after the company said a new vaccine to fight the omicron strain of the coronavirus could be ready by early 2022 if required.

The stock jumped 21 per cent during Friday's global selloff amid concerns about the new variant, solidifying its position as the top performer on the S&P 500 in the year to date.

The company mobilised hundreds of workers on Thanksgiving Day last Thursday in order to start work on Omicron, chief medical officer Paul Burton said at the weekend.

Moderna's mRNA technology is ideally suited to adapting vaccines to new variants, said Piper Sandler analyst Edward A. Tenthoff, who has an overweight rating on the stock. "Moderna is in a better position to develop a novel Covid-19 vaccine, and now has capacity to manufacture several hundred million vaccine doses every month," he wrote in a note to clients on Sunday. "SARS-CoV-2 is not going away and will provide years of future revenues," he added.

In a separate interview with CNBC, however, Moderna chief executive officer Stephane Bancel said the company could take months to begin shipping a vaccine that works specifically against the Omicron variant. He that the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines against the variant was currently not known, and that there should be more clarity in about two weeks. Moderna had said last Friday (Nov 26) that it was working to advance a booster candidate tailored to the new variant and has also been testing a higher dose of its existing booster and to study other booster candidates designed to protect against multiple variants.

Separately, rivals Pfizer and BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson have also said they have begun testing their vaccines against the new variant.

BLOOMBERG, REUTERS