An advisory committee to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday recommended that generally everyone 6 months and older receive an updated COVID-19 vaccine.
The recommendation now goes to agency director Dr. Mandy Cohen, who will make her own recommendation that clinicians have been waiting for before administering the vaccinations. Should everything move forward as expected, the shots could be available in vaccine clinics, pharmacies and doctor’s office later this week.
The latest vaccine was formulated to target an Omicron subvariant that was dominant earlier this year: XBB.1.5, unofficially known as Kraken. Though a monovalent shot, meaning it was specifically designed to target that strain, recent data suggest the updated vaccine will continue to provide strong protection against closely related, more recently emerging subvariants such as EG.5, also known as Eris; and BA.2.86, unofficially dubbed Pirola.
Available information “suggests that the vaccines are a good match for protecting against the currently circulating COVID-19 variants,” according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The new formula replaces last year’s version of the vaccine, which was a bivalent shot targeting not only the BA.5 subvariant that was dominant for a good portion of 2022, but also the ancestral coronavirus strain that swept across the globe in early 2020.
Officials have said the new shot no longer needs to be designed against the ancestral coronavirus strain, which is essentially extinct. Virtually all coronavirus cases today are caused by descendants of Omicron, a highly infectious variant that initially emerged in late 2021.
The CDC advisory committee voted to recommend the new vaccinations as authorized by the FDA.
The FDA on Monday gave the following authorizations:
• Adults and children age 5 and older can receive a single dose of this autumn’s updated COVID-19 vaccine from either Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech, as long as it has been two months since their last dose.
• Previously vaccinated babies and young children, ages 6 months to 4 years, can receive one or two doses of the updated Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The timing and number of doses will depend on which COVID-19 vaccine they previously received.
Unvaccinated babies and young children in this age group can receive two doses of the updated Moderna vaccine or three doses of the updated offering from Pfizer-BioNTech.
CDC officials say that people who recently have had COVID-19 can either get the new vaccination as soon as they feel better or wait three months — the timing is up to the patient.
Tuesday’s action does not affect Novavax.
In a statement Monday, the FDA said it “is confident in the safety and effectiveness of these updated vaccines.”
“The updated vaccines are expected to provide good protection against COVID-19 from the currently circulating variants. Barring the emergence of a markedly more virulent variant, the FDA anticipates that the composition of COVID-19 vaccines may need to be updated annually, as is done for the seasonal influenza vaccine,” the agency said.
The move to mirror the seasonal cadence of the flu shot reflects the shift out of the emergency phase of the pandemic into an era where the coronavirus, though still prevalent, merits more a predictable schedule than rapidly shifting response.
One key question remains, however: How many people will take the new COVID-19 shot?
As of this spring just 21% of adults, and 43% of seniors, nationwide had received the updated COVID-19 vaccine that first became available a year ago. That lags estimated uptake on the flu shot. Preliminary surveys estimate that as of early spring, half of all adults and more than 70% of seniors had received a flu shot.
While COVID-19 has become less deadly thanks to vaccines, therapeutic drugs like Paxlovid, years of built-up natural immunity and a more slowly evolving coronavirus, it can still cause plenty of disruption, and be deadly for some people.
“COVID-19 burden is currently lower than at previous points in the pandemic, however, the absolute number of hospitalizations and deaths is still high,” Megan Wallace, a CDC epidemiologist, said during Tuesday’s advisory committee meeting. “Although hospitalization rates are currently low in some age groups, we have seen rates increase in recent weeks, and anticipate further increases as we enter respiratory virus season.”
From last October through April, more than 70,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported nationally.
That’s far fewer than the comparable time period the prior year, where more than 270,000 died. The first autumn-winter wave of the pandemic was the worst, with more than 370,000 people dying between October 2020 through the end of April 2021, when vaccinations were either not yet released or were still generally in short supply.
COVID-19 is still causing more deaths than the flu, but it’s far less of a public health threat than it used to be.
Between October and the end of April, COVID-19 caused about double the number of deaths that the flu has caused annually, on average.
Flu generally causes 35,000 deaths a year, based on an average of the 10 flu seasons preceding the pandemic. Between last October through the end of April, flu was estimated to cause somewhere between 19,000 and 58,000 deaths.
Staying current on COVID-19 vaccines continues to lower the risk of adverse health outcomes and death, especially for older people, experts say. Most people who are still dying of COVID-19 were not current on their vaccination.
It’s also still possible for normally healthy children and younger adults to become seriously ill with COVID-19.
Among adults under the age of 50 who were admitted to an intensive care unit with COVID-19 between July 2022 and last June, 13% had no underlying conditions. The same was true of 22% of adolescent ICU COVID patients. Among babies and young children age 6 months to 23 months, more than half admitted to the ICU with COVID-19 had no underlying health conditions.
And while incidence of long COVID has decreased since the start of the pandemic, symptoms associated with the condition are still common following coronavirus infection, Wallace said.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
