An FDA Panel Decides It ’s Time For New COVID-19 Boosters

On June 28, a panel of experts convened by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) voted 19 to 2 to change the vaccines that have been used since December 2020 to protect against COVID-19. The change, which will apply only to booster doses for people who are already vaccinated, involves including a strain that targets the Omicron variant, which is now responsible for nearly all infections of COVID-19 in the U.S. and around the world. But the committee stopped short of deciding exactly which Omicron strain; Omicron has produced many different subvariants, starting with BA.1 and now BA.4 and BA.5, the latter two which now account for 50% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Including an Omicron strain in the next booster is similar to the way flu viruses are swapped out every year to give people the strongest immunity against whichever version of influenza is circulating at the time. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The committee’s decision is based on several lines of evidence, including the fact that Omicron is different from the original version of the virus in the currently approved vaccines. The original COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the booster doses that have been authorized in the U.S., have all targeted an earlier strain of the virus known as D614G, which public health experts call the ancestral strain. The experts also heard from scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who provided data showing that these original vaccine...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news