The FDA’s expert panel on vaccines voted Thursday to recommend that anyone who gets a Covid vaccine going forward will receive a bivalent shot instead of the original formula.
It’s an important first step in a process that could result in millions of Americans getting an annual Covid booster, similar to the flu vaccine. Any such changes still require more discussion and decisions, but the FDA appears to be pivoting from responding to the acute phase of the pandemic to a longer-term norm.
The agency’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products committee voted 21-0 to recommend replacing the originally authorized Covid-19 vaccine regime with the bivalent version of the vaccine. That version was reformulated last fall by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to provide protection against the BA.4/BA.5 Omicron subvariants, which were widely circulating at the time and were capable of infecting those who had received the original vaccine series and booster.
Recent evidence suggests that the current bivalent provides protection against severe disease and death from the XBB.1 variant that is dominant in the U.S. right now.
According to the CDC, roughly 69 percent of adults living in the U.S. have completed their primary vaccination series. More than 80 percent have received at least one shot, but 20 percent remain completely unvaccinated. Only about 15 percent of Americans, or 50 million people, have received bivalent boosters so far.
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