The COVID-19 Vaccine Is Likely Getting an Update

In a unanimous vote, the 21 members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s vaccine committee recommended an update to the COVID-19 vaccine to better match the viral strains currently circulating in the country and around the world. The panel voted to move away from the current bivalent vaccine, which is designed to tackle the original virus and BA.4 and BA.5 variants, to a vaccine that is better able to protect against the XBB family of variants. The half a dozen different versions of XBB viruses account for nearly all new infections in the U.S., with two—XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16—currently dominating. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The group decided that the vaccine should also target only one of the XBB strains since the many XBB viruses are closely related. There was general agreement that the strain should be XBB.1.5, which currently causes the most cases in the U.S., but it will be up to the FDA to make that final determination. The committee heard from vaccine makers Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Novavax, all of whom provided data showing that prototype vaccines their scientists made against XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16 produce about equally robust levels of antibodies against either version of the virus, as well as against other rising variants like XBB.2.3. The manufacturers also provided data showing that the number of mutations separating the XBB strains was very small—on the order of two or three changes—which suggests that ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news