Moderna has joined the world’s major manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines in the race to investigate the new Omicron variant and adapt their shots to combat the new strain, which has a high number of mutations and appears to spread rapidly. Speaking on the BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday, Moderna’s chief medical officer Paul Burton said that large quantities of a new and reformulated vaccine to combat the newly identified variant could be available early next year. Burton noted that scientists and researchers are still “really trying to work out” the new variant and establish whether or not it is more transmissible, how severe its side effects are, and how they can contain and control it with the currently available vaccines; the latter of which researchers should know within a couple of weeks after conducting laboratory experiments. “We should know about the ability of the current vaccine to provide protection in the next couple …