Moderna Says Vaccine Still Protects Against Virus Variants
Source: New York Times
Moderna’s vaccine is effective against new variants of the coronavirus that have emerged in Britain and South Africa, the company announced on Monday. But it appears to be less protective against the variant discovered in South Africa, and so the company is developing a new form of the vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against that virus.
“We’re doing it today to be ahead of the curve should we need to,” Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said in an interview. “I think of it as an insurance policy.” He added, “I don’t know if we need it, and I hope we don’t.”Moderna reported findings from a study that used blood samples from eight people who had received two doses of the vaccine, and two monkeys that had also been immunized.
The British variant had no impact on the levels of neutralizing antibodies — the type that can disable the virus — produced following vaccination. But with the South African form, there was a sixfold reduction in those levels.Even so, the company said, those antibodies “remain above levels that are expected to be protective.”
Moderna collaborated on the study with the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/health/coronavirus-moderna-vaccine-variant.html
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you can't compare this to the "yearly flu shot" and how they update those for the most common circulating Influenza A/B strains. Completely different mechanisms. Neither the Moderna nor the Pfizer vaccines utilizes viral components for their modes of operation. Their vaccines are essentially (in a simplistic description) temporarily making GMOs out of some of your cells to make them mimic a coronavirus. 
(mRNA) and actually transport the special sequence (via little host cells) into the body where they migrate to certain of your own cells and trigger those cells to start creating "fake" coronavirus-looking "spikes" to "mimic" an actual COVID-19 invader, and that then triggers the body to react to that and devise antibodies to attach to those spikes. Those antibodies were found to be effective in attaching to "real" COVID-19 spikes to keep the virus from attaching to their preferred landing spots and thus be rendered unable to replicate.
It's pretty cool.
Most if not all other viral vaccines use some component of an actual virus (like flu, polio, measles, etc) and inject that in order to trigger a reaction but these do not use that method (the J&J and I think the AstraZenec one, along with the delayed GSK-Sanofi one, and the now-defunct Merck vaccines use/used some type of viral component).
From what it appears Moderna is doing is that they had multiple "candidate" mRNA sequences that they had been testing for the initial vaccine and they selected the one that had the most effectiveness. But now it might be that one of the others they had evaluated could cover the variants (and/or they had been developing additional candidates in general and are thinking one of those might be good as a booster to go with the current one).
