Additional COVID-19 Booster Shots? Officials Anticipate FDA Authorization Within Few Weeks
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly moving toward authorizing a second round of omicron-targeted COVID-19 booster shots for the elderly and other people at high risk.
- FDA officials could decide within a few weeks and could change their mind, Wall Street Journal reported citing the people close to the matter.
- The deliberations come as some people especially vulnerable to infection have asked their doctors to give them a second round of the updated booster, even though the FDA hasn’t approved it.
- Some infectious-disease experts have called on federal health officials to permit another booster shot to safeguard people with comparatively weaker immune defenses better, as the U.K. and Canada have done.
- According to data from the CDC, people who get the shots are one-fourteenth as likely to die than unvaccinated people who didn’t get the updated shot.
- Yet less than 17% of the total population have taken a second booster, compared with 69% who got the primary series, according to the CDC.
- About 40% of people 65 years and older have received the updated, dual-target shot below earlier levels.
- In August, the FDA approved the bivalent COVID boosters targeting the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants from Pfizer Inc (NYSE: PFE)/BioNTech SE (NASDAQ: BNTX) and Moderna Inc (NASDAQ: MRNA), along with the original strain.
- Photo by Johaehn from Pixabay
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