The FDA has called for updating COVID vaccines to address the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. But will the shots keep up with the virus?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has advised vaccine makers to update COVID booster shots to target new forms of the Omicron variant. In calling for the change, the FDA heeded the recommendations of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee , which voted 19–2 in favor of Omicron-adapted boosters after a public meeting on June 28.
Existing vaccines target the ancestral form of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, which first surfaced in Wuhan, China. But although these shots still broadly protect against severe disease, “their effectiveness does appear to wane with time,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, during the late June VRBPAC meeting. Each new variant has been successively more contagious than its predecessor.
The planned updates are currently limited to mRNA vaccine boosters developed by Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration. These companies are now racing against time to test new products and generate the millions of doses needed to supply the FDA’s planned fall booster campaign. Scientific American spoke with experts from academia and industry about the prospects for moving toward these shots.COVID vaccines to date have targeted only the ancestral virus. Per the FDA’s recommendation, in addition to that virus, the new boosters will target the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, which accounted for about 70 percent of new COVID cases in the U.S. as of July 2.
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