Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Tuesday on an investor call that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could simply authorize the company’s new Covid-19 recall until the end of the month, moving closer to a formula of normal flu vaccines that stick to the coronavirus as it evolves. and as people’s immunity fades.
In June, Pfizer, along with its German spouse BioNTech, petitioned the FDA to approve a new edition of its recall of the Covid-19 vaccine designed to oppose XBB. 1. 5, a subvariant of the coronavirus that emerged in late 2022.
XBB. 1. 5 is no longer the dominant strain, having been usurped via XBB. 1. 6, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but experts say the two are similar enough that a new recall shield would oppose either (XBB. 1. 5 accounted for 12. 3% of all new instances at the end of July, while XBB. 1. 6 accounted for 14. 8%, according to CDC data).
Bourla said he and his colleagues expect “a new wave of covid to start in the U. S. “”The new edition of the vaccine needs to be available before then.
However, given that only 17% of the U. S. population is in the U. S. population. While the U. S. government won a booster shot in the fall of 2022 that was updated for the Omicron variant, according to the CDC, it’s unclear how many Americans will decide to adopt the newer booster. .
The CDC will eventually propose who deserves to receive the updated boosters, but that announcement will likely only come after the FDA approves them. The recent peak boosters released in the fall of 2022 were, regardless, advised by the CDC for anyone over the age of six.
The first Covid-19 vaccine booster shots, approved by the FDA in the fall of 2021, were meant to help fill waning immunity to the virus. However, after the Omicron variant of the coronavirus introduced a vicious new wave of the pandemic last year, drugmakers rolled out a modified “bivalent” booster shot in the fall of 2022, designed to protect the original virus strain and Omicron, which is more resistant to the original vaccines. This new booster attempts to do what this bivalent booster did with Omicron, but with an update for XBB strains. The news comes as another 8,035 people were hospitalized with Covid-19 in the week ending July 22, according to the most recent data available from the CDC. That’s a 12. 1% increase from last week, but far from the January 2022 peak, when there were about 150,000 hospitalizations per week.
This new recall coincides with doctors’ longstanding predictions that covid-19 vaccines are likely to become similar to the flu vaccine, where a new iteration is published each year to update formulas to new strains of the virus. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and head of the federal government’s response to the pandemic, said at a White House briefing in September 2022: “We are probably heading down a path with a vaccination rate similar to the annual flu vaccine, with Covid-19 injections updated annually and tailored to the strains lately in flux for the maximum of the population.
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