Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated COVID-19 booster vaccines that target the highly transmittable omicron variant are expected to be ready for rollout in a matter of days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signed off on the updated shots.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed a recommendation from an advisory panel on Thursday, paving the way for health providers and pharmacies to begin distributing the updated boosters to the public as early as this weekend.
FDA AUTHORIZES MODERNA AND PFIZER-BIONTECH OMICRON-SPECIFIC BOOSTERS
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of outside medical and public health experts that provides recommendations on how the vaccines should be administered, voted 13-1 to recommend the shots.
The recommendation comes a day after the FDA authorized Moderna’s booster for those 18 and older and Pfizer-BioNTech’s for use in people 12 and older. The public is eligible to receive the updated booster after at least two months have passed since they received their last booster, regardless of how many have been received, or their primary two-dose vaccination series.
For those who have had a recent COVID-19 infection, the CDC will suggest waiting three months from symptom onset or since receiving a positive test result before receiving their next vaccination, including the updated booster.
Over 200 million people are expected to be eligible for the updated booster, according to data presented by a CDC official Thursday.
Committee members in Thursday’s meeting expressed concerns that the updated booster recipe has not been widely tested on humans and is reliant on preclinical trials from testing on mice and previous data from earlier COVID-19 vaccines. Others disagreed with the recommendation for two months after the prior shot and argued that it should be a longer period of time, such as six months.
Half of the updated booster recipe targets the original strain of the virus from 2020, and the other half targets omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5., which account for most COVID-19 cases circulating in the United States. The FDA said the shots are expected to provide better protection from infection and severe disease against the highly contagious variant, though vaccine experts have said how much additional protection they provide is unclear.
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The Biden administration has already purchased 171 million doses of Moderna’s and Pfizer-BioNTech’s bivalent boosters in anticipation of their approval to speed up rollout to the public.
