a study Posted on September 16 in New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) makes a strong case for an Omicron-based COVID-19 booster dose.
But first, a warning: There is no data available yet showing the effectiveness of the new Omicron booster authorized On August 31, which protects against BA.4 and BA.5. The new study, by Moderna, includes the company’s first joint vaccine that has not yet been released to the market; It targets both the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and an earlier version of the Omicron variant, BA.1. It is the data that the FDA and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have relied most heavily in deciding whether to authorize the combination booster targeting the original virus and the newest Omicron variants, BA.4 and BA.5. Human studies involving the new approved boosters from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have just begun and won’t be completed for a few months.
Data provided by Moderna In the NEJM The study is our best proxy right now for how well the new boosters work, and the results are promising. In the study, more than 800 volunteers received either a booster dose of Moderna’s original dose against SARS-CoV-2 or a booster dose of a bivalent booster against each of the two original UMicron BA.1 strains. All subjects in the study were vaccinated with the initial two-dose series of Moderna and boosted once before the start of the study.
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About a month after the shot, the people who received the bivalent booster showed higher levels of anti-virus antibodies than the people who got the original booster. The antibodies generated were also able to better bind and neutralize not only the original viruses and BA.1, but almost all other known variants as well, including Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Omicron BA.4 and BA. 5.
Pfizer-BioNTech – which also made a BA.1 bivalent vaccine that has not yet been released to the market –mentioned Similarly encouraging results from a bivalent BA.1 booster were submitted to the Food and Drug Administration’s Committee on Vaccines Experts last June, but those results have not yet been published in a scientific journal. At the Food and Drug Administration meeting (at which Moderna also provided bivalent BA.1 data), Pfizer-BioNTech presented data from a study of more than 300 people aged 55 and older who received the bivalent booster. People who got it produced significantly higher levels of antibodies against BA.1, as well as BA.4 and BA.5, than those who got the original booster. The level of antibody was lower against BA.4 and BA.5, however, than the level produced against BA.1. The study also showed that the side effects associated with the Omicron BA.1 bivalent vaccine were similar to those of the original vaccine.
As more and more people are rolling up their sleeves to get the new Omicron booster, the data on how well the vaccine protects people from not only serious illness, but also infection, will become clear. The researchers will also look at how long this protection lasts. The hope is that better matching the booster to the circulating strain will provide people with more lasting protection and lead to annual shots, not more.
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