Pfizer seeks OK of COVID booster that targets Omicron
Pfizer asked U.S. regulators Monday to authorize its combination COVID-19 vaccine that adds protection against Omicron subvariants, a key step toward opening a fall booster campaign.
The Food and Drug Administration ordered vaccine makers to tweak their shots to target the BA.4 and BA.5 strains that are better than ever at dodging immunity from earlier vaccination or infection.
If the FDA quickly clears the updated shots made by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, boosters could be offered within weeks.
The U.S. has a contract to buy 105 million doses of the updated vaccine as soon as health authorities greenlight them, and the company said doses are ready to ship.
Moderna is expected to file a similar application soon. The U.S. has a contract to buy 66 million doses of that updated vaccine.
“It’s going to be really important that people this fall and winter get the new shots. It’s designed for the virus that’s out there,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said last week.
Determining which version of the coronavirus should be used to make COVID-19 vaccines and boosters is an exercise in educated guesswork.
For now at least. Nearly 89% of coronavirus specimens now circulating in the U.S. are of the BA.5 variety, and 4% are BA.4, according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those two strains are also responsible for the majority of infections in much of the rest of the world.
But there’s no way to know whether that will still be the case this winter — or if other variants will have replaced it.
Last week, U.K. regulators became the first in the world to authorize a different update to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines. Those shots added protection against the BA.1 version of Omicron that struck last winter.
The U.S. opted not to target that same strain, setting up a fall in which different countries will be using different versions of booster shots to rev up protection against another possible winter surge.
