How quickly will Covid vaccines be able to be made against variants? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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The mu variant of Covid-19 is spreading, with new variants cropping up all the time. Anna Durbin, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins, says although variants are concerning, the beauty of mRNA vaccines is the ease with which new ones can be created.

Durbin: They’ve already made variant specific mRNA vaccines. It’s really easy to do. As soon as you know the sequence you can redesign your RNA insert. The other thing that they’ll do in terms of how you license it, it’ll be looking at antibody response, so it’ll be immune bridging trials to show that the variant antibody titers are within statistically specific designed range of the other mRNA vaccines and then they’ll be good to go.  :31

Durbin says other strategies such as masking are also a good idea since as long as the virus keeps infecting people new variants will continue to emerge. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.