BioNTech chief confident Covid jab will work on variant found in India

BioNTech’s chief executive has said he is confident the Covid-19 vaccine his company pioneered with Pfizer will work against a new variant circulating in India, where health officials are recording hundreds of thousands of new coronavirus cases a day. Ugur Sahin, who founded the German biotech with his wife Ozlem Tureci, said BioNTech had developed the vaccine with variants in mind. “[It] will hold, I’m confident of that,” he said, adding that BioNTech’s early experience developing cancer therapies meant that the company had been prepared for the virus to mutate. “We come out of cancer medicine and [there] the tumour is constantly changing and mutating . . . So we have experience with these escape mechanisms,” he said at an online meeting with reporters.