The New COVID-19 Shot Is Surprisingly Effective Against the Latest Variant

The latest COVID-19 vaccine offers good protection against the currently dominant strain of the virus, according to a new report in the MMWR, a journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s the first effectiveness data for the updated vaccine, which was released last fall. Using federal and pharmacy-reported data sets, the team of CDC scientists compared people’s COVID-19 test results to their self-reported vaccination status collected from September 2023 to mid-January 2024. They found that the new vaccine was about 54% effective at protecting people from symptoms of COVID-19. In other words, the symptoms that prompted people to get tested were less likely to be due to COVID-19 and more likely to be something else among those who were vaccinated a week to four months before getting tested. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] They further calculated that the vaccine was 49% effective at protecting against symptoms from the JN.1 variant, which now causes a majority of infections in the U.S.—even though the shot was designed to target a different version of the virus, the XBB.1.5 variant. That part of the analysis was based on the fact that current SARS-CoV-2 lab tests look for three major genetic signatures of the virus, which most of the variants previously contained. JN.1, however, is missing one of them, which allows scientists to distinguish the JN.1 samples from those containing other variants. ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news