The United States approved updated Covid-19 vaccines on Tuesday, hoping to increase protection against the latest variants of the coronavirus and mitigate the surge that could emerge this fall and winter.
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision makes the latest vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and its partner BioNTech available to Americans, even if they have never been vaccinated against the coronavirus. This is a change in the way Covid-19 vaccine updates are treated to a treatment similar to receiving the annual flu vaccine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have an advisory panel that will issue recommendations on who most needs updated vaccines.
Vaccination could begin this week and both the Covid-19 vaccine and the flu vaccine can be administered at the same visit.
A third vaccine maker, Novavax, said authorities are still reviewing its updated vaccine.
Covid-19 hospitalizations have increased since late summer, although, thanks to long-lasting immunity from vaccines and previous infections, not as much as this time last year.
However, protection wanes over time and the coronavirus continually produces new variants that can evade previous immunity.
It has been more than a year since the vaccines were last updated and only about 20 percent of adults had received the previous update, according to the data.
“Vaccination remains critical to public health and continued protection against the serious consequences of Covid-19, including hospitalization and death,” FDA vaccine chief Peter Marks said in a statement.
“We strongly encourage those who are eligible to consider getting vaccinated,” he said.
The FDA is not calling this latest version a “booster,” but rather an updated vaccine to better fit the virus currently in circulation. The new prescription targets an omicron variant called XBB.1.5, which replaces outdated combination vaccines that combined protection against the original coronavirus variant and an earlier version of omicron.
And although even the XBB.1.5 variant is no longer dominant, the FDA has determined that it is close enough to the coronavirus strains that cause most Covid-19 illnesses today to offer good cross-protection.
Source: TSF
