The European Medicines Agency (EMA) warned on Friday that new variants of the coronavirus could appear in the winter, but assured that vaccines will protect the population against severe forms of the disease.
Faced with the prospect of a new wave of infections before the end of the year, the European Union is preparing to launch a campaign of booster doses of the vaccine against Covid-19.
This campaign will be run with modified vaccines – which the EMA approved on Thursday – for the Ómicron variant and with vaccines developed against the first variant of the virus, which first appeared in China in 2019, the EMA has explained. But “people shouldn’t wait for a specific vaccine,” said EMA’s head of vaccination strategy, Marco Cavaleri. “There may be a new variant that we cannot predict today,” he added.
The EMA on Thursday approved Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines against the Ómicron BA.1 subvariant.
Approval is also expected in mid-September for a new Pfizer vaccine against Ómicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5.
These micron-adapted vaccines would be reserved primarily for the most vulnerable people, such as the elderly, pregnant women and health professionals, Cavaleri said.
On the other hand, it is not “excluded” that new variants will appear closer to Ómicrons this winter, according to the institution.
Source: El heraldo
