COVID-19 vaccines tweaked to better match today's omicron threat are expected to roll out in a few weeks but still up in the air is how much benefit the booster shots will offer, who should get one — and how soon.Pfizer and rival Moderna both asked United States regulators this week to authorize modified versions of their booster vaccine — shots that are half the original recipe and half protection against BA.4 and BA.5, the newest versions of omicron, AP reported.The Food and Drug Administration ordered that recipe and now is evaluating what scientists call a &bivalent vaccine,& with a decision expected soon.Dr.
Peter Marks, the FDA's vaccine chief, said Thursday that once authorized, the tweaked boosters could help right away — while BA.5 infections still are too high — as well as hopefully blunt yet another winter surge.Marks told the Associated Press that the new boosters could rev up the immune system to prevent not just serious illness but maybe milder infections, too, like the original vaccines did earlier in the pandemic, before super-contagious mutants emerged.The hope here is that by better matching things, not only will we get that benefit or even more, but we&ll also have that last for a longer period of time,& he said.BA.5 currently is causing nearly all COVID-19 infections in the United States and much of the world.
Current COVID-19 vaccines match the coronavirus strain that circulated in early 2020.
And while those vaccinations still offer strong protection against serious illness or death from COVID-19, there's little effectiveness against infection from the wildly mutated omicron family.The first update to the recipe is an an important but expected next step — like how flu vaccines get updated every year.
True next-generation vaccines are still in development.We need to give a clear, forward-looking set of expectations,& said University of Pennsylvania immunologist E.
John Wherry, who compares vaccine tweaks to periodically updating your computer software.The gamble is that BA.5, or something similar, still will be circulating through the winter.
(Vaccines target the spike protein that coat the coronavirus, and the BA.4 and BA.5 spikes are identical although those strains vary in other ways.) The post Tweaked COVID boosters close but how much will they help? first appeared on Ariana News.