Bill Gates: third shot may be needed to combat new Coronavirus variants

On Wednesday, world figure Bill Gates expressed during his interview with CBS News that a third shot of COVID-19 vaccine may be needed to combat the mutated forms of the virus such as the variant emerged in the UK, and the one sparked in South Africa.

Gates told CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell, 'The discussion now is do we just need to get a super high coverage of the current vaccine, or do we need a third dose that's just the same, or do we need a modified vaccine?'

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He elaborated, 'All five of the companies that have U.S. vaccines are looking at making that modification and adding that in so that people who've already had two shots might need to get a third shot," adding 'I think it's reasonably likely that we will have a tuned vaccine just to make absolutely sure that as these variants hit the U.S. that they're not escaping from vaccine protection.'

Currently, the world's second richest man funds new scientific studies in South Africa observing the impact of AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax COVID-19 vaccines against the outbreak of new virus' strains.

Last week, the Daily Mail posted a new study showing the effect of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine against the mutated variants of the virus.

The found showed that the Pfizer vaccine showed efficiency against the new COVID-19 variants that emerged in the UK and South Africa.

Scientists from Oxford University found that the Pfizer vaccine managed to reduce the activity of the mutated virus in the body.

Furthermore, it increased the work of the immune system to produce more antibodies to fight the infection.

Previously, it was reported that the Pfizer vaccine is 95 percent effective against the earliest discovered forms of the COVID-19.

On the other hand, scientists concern that more mutated variants of the new COVID-19 strains that emerged in Brazil and South Africa could be stronger than previously tested vaccines.

A few days ago, the leading Financial Times posted the results of a new study about the efficiency of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on the new mutated COVID-19 strains such as the South Africa variant.