Omicron-specific COVID boosters may improve protection
Key Takeaways:
- The European Medicines Agency and other international health officials said on Friday that coronavirus vaccines that have been altered to include the Omicron variant strain could offer superior protection.
- Omicron-specific boosters, according to the World Health Organization, could restore protection against fresh coronavirus strains.
When given as a booster shot, coronavirus vaccines modified to incorporate the Omicron variant strain can provide better protection, according to the European Medicines Agency and other international health regulators on Friday.
Following a meeting on Thursday, the EMA said that international authorities had reached a consensus on fundamental guidelines for revising COVID-19 injections to address new variations.
The researchers claimed that although the current coronavirus vaccinations offer effective protection against hospitalization and mortality, vaccine efficacy has decreased as the virus has changed.
Therefore, the EMA stated that an Omicron-specific or bivalent booster vaccine that contains both the new strain and the original coronavirus strain could "increase and extend" protection.
The mRNA vaccines are particularly mentioned in the statement. To include the Omicron variation, Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. have tested modified versions of their vaccines.
According to the statement, vaccines that contain additional variants, such as the Beta variant, may also be used as boosters if clinical trial results show a sufficient level of neutralization against Omicron and other problematic variants.
The World Health Organization advised that Omicron-specific boosters could restore protection against new coronavirus strains.
However, it falls short of the stance taken by the American regulatory body, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which declared on Thursday that it would specifically seek to include the more recent BA.4 and BA.5 strains of Omicron, which are currently responsible for a rise in new infections across the globe, in any new vaccines intended for use domestically.
The leader of a WHO advisory committee that has studied the modified shots stated on Tuesday that the panel favored boosters based on the BA.1 variant because it is more unique and may elicit a more widespread immune response than the more recently circulated subvariants.
According to top FDA official Peter Marks, other nations' regulators are seriously considering using new boosters based on the variant of the BA.1 Omicron virus that spiked the number of cases dramatically last winter. This is because those shots could be made available sooner than the BA.4/5-based booster the United States intends to use.
In the upcoming days, the EMA promised to release further information.