The Food and Drug Administration on Monday proposed a new strategy for covid-19 vaccines that updates annual vaccines for adults, in a move that aims to simplify the vaccination procedure by adopting a technique similar to annual flu shots.
The FDA defined its proposed strategy Monday ahead of Thursday’s meeting of its advisory committee on vaccines and related biologics, which must approve the proposal.
If approved, this new technique would abandon the existing procedure in which other people would first have to get two doses of the original vaccine, spaced a few weeks apart, followed by a bivalent booster two months later, specifically formulated to protect against further infections. variants.
Instead, I would recommend that healthy adults get the newest vaccine year-on-year formulas, regardless of their vaccination history, such as annual flu shots, NPR reported Monday.
Older and immunocompromised Americans will need to get two doses of reformulated vaccine annually.
In a statement shared with Forbes, the FDA said the goal of Thursday’s assembly was to read about “how and if the composition of the number one doses . . . should be modified”, as well as “the composition and timing of booster doses” in the future. .
15,3 %. That’s the percentage of all Americans who received a bivalent booster dose for covid-19, according to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, only about 70 percent of all Americans received the first two doses of the vaccine.
It is unclear whether the informed strategy will help encourage vaccination or be effective in preventing widespread infections. The decline in the use of dual-dose withdrawals, despite evidence that they offer greater coverage, indicates that an annual withdrawal strategy would likely place far fewer users. The effectiveness of the reformulated spices will also likely be a question mark, as the injections will evolve well before the annual vaccination season, meaning that the emergence of newer, more elusive variants may also simply negate their usefulness. For comparison, 51. 4 percent of Americans got a flu shot annually for the 2022-23 season, according to CDC estimates.
CDC surveillance information on covid variants highlights the challenge of finding a vaccine to track new variants and subvariants of covid-19. all infections, while the XBB. 1. 5 variant 0%. However, at present, XBB. 1. 5 accounts for nearly a portion of all infections in the United States, while BA. 5 has fallen to 2%.
FDA Considers Major Change in COVID Vaccination Strategy (NPR)
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