San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
U.S. booster drive shifts to updated vaccine formulas
U.S. regulators are no longer considering authorizing a second COVID-19 booster shot for all adults under 50 this summer, focusing instead on revamped vaccines for the fall that will target the newest viral subvariants.
Pfizer and Moderna expect to have updated versions of their shots available as early as September, the Food and Drug Administration said. That would set the stage for a fall booster campaign to strengthen protection against the latest versions of omicron.
The announcement means the U.S. won’t pursue a summer round of boosters using the current vaccines for adults under 50, as some Biden administration officials and outside experts previously suggested.
Currently, all Americans age 5 and over are eligible for a booster shot five months after their initial primary series. Fourth doses of the Pfizer or Moderna shots — a second booster — are recommended for Americans 50 and older and for younger people with serious health issues that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19.
The FDA urged eligible adults who haven’t been boosted to get their extra shot now: “You can still benefit from existing booster options and leave time to receive an updated booster in the fall,” the agency said.
The White House has also emphasized that getting a fourth dose now won’t impact anyone’s ability to get omicron-targeted shots once they’re made available — although how long its been since their last dose will play a role in how soon they’re eligible.
Two omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, are even more contagious than their predecessors and have pushed new daily cases above 125,000 and hospitalizations to 6,300. The subvariants are offshoots of the strain responsible for nearly all of the virus spread in the U.S. this year.
All the COVID-19 vaccines given in the U.S. until now have been based on the original version of the virus that began spreading across the country in early 2020.
In June, the FDA told the vaccine makers that any boosters for the fall would have to combine protection against omicron BA.4 and BA.5 and the original coronavirus strain. Both manufacturers have been speeding their production and data gathering to have the bivalent vaccines ready for the fall.
The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have to sign off on revamped shots before their use.
in curbing the spread of the virus, according to a report from KRON.
The researchers found that even though a majority of tests currently go unreported, skewing the true case numbers in the nation’s most populated regions, the test positive rate among at-home tests and medical PCR tests are roughly the same, providing at least one reliable signpost of pandemic trends.
“This is actually reassuring that our surveillance data in the U.S. using test positivity numbers actually is reflecting positivity on different kinds of tests,” said Dr. Mark Pletcher, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and one of the study’s lead researchers.
colds could provide some protection against severe COVID illness, according to a study by Kaiser Permanente researchers in Northern California.
COVID-19 and about a quarter of viruses that cause the common cold are part of the coronavirus family.
“Every parent knows that young children are vectors for cold viruses, and adults who are exposed to them at home or through their work report getting sick often,” said lead author Dr. Matthew Solomon. “But exposed adults often report they don’t get as sick after a few years. One possible explanation is that constant exposure to colds helps people develop some immunity to these viruses.”
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that adults without children who got COVID were 49% more likely to be hospitalized and 76% more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit than adults with COVID who had children under five
years old.
The study looked at records for more than 3 million adult members of Kaiser Northern California from two years before the pandemic through the first year of COVID.