The COVID vaccines are being updated soon
Preliminary Announcement of COVID-19 Vaccinations in the Light of the Covid-19 Summer ’23 Outburst
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to green light new COVID-19 vaccines any day now to help people protect themselves from the latest strains of the virus.
The newer strains have already overtaken the older ones, but they are still part of the omicron group. The hope is the vaccines are close enough to boost immunity and protect people through the rest of the surprisingly big summer wave and the surge expected this winter.
The updated vaccines, from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, target a variant of Omicron called KP.2, one of the several so-called “FLiRT variants” that collectively are responsible for the current Covid wave. The new vaccines will likely take a few weeks to reach pharmacies and doctors offices.
The new 2024-2025 formula is meant to boost protection against hospitalization and death due to Covid. In the year of ’23, more than 850,000 people were hospitalized due to Covid-19 and more than 75,500 people died from it. Vaccination can also protect against long Covid, a chronic condition that lasts at least three months after an infection.
“Anyone who wants to get this vaccine should get it,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the University of Pennsylvania who advises the FDA. It makes sense that someone would want to get it because it reduces your chances of getting a mild or moderate Infection for up to six months and it also decreases your chances of spreading the virus. But the calculation could be different for younger people. Offit says that if a 35-year-old healthy adult had already received multiple vaccine doses he wouldn’t feel compelled to get it.
“Right now we’re in a wave, so you’d like to get protection against what’s going on right now,” Marks says. “So I would probably get vaccinated in as timely a manner as possible. Because right now the match is reasonably close. You’re probably going to get the most benefit from this vaccine against what is currently circulating. I will be on line as soon as it gets rolled out.
Some people could consider waiting until September or October if they’re especially concerned about maximizing protection through the winter surge and over the holidays.
“In my opinion, everyone should get one of the new vaccines,” says Dr. George Diaz, chief of medicine at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett in Everett, Wash., and a spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America. The prevention of transmission will be prevented if you are vaccines yourself. So that will help reduce the spread of the disease in the community, especially to the most vulnerable people. You are helping others as well as yourself.
Some argue that people with already got immunity from all the shots might not need another shot, since they already have enough immunity.
Insured people can get all three vaccines for free if they get their shot from an in-network provider. But a federal program that paid for the vaccines for uninsured adults expired.
According to Kelly Moore, an advocate for Immunize.org, public health is concerned about how people will access protection and how we will solve that problem. The uninsured are least likely to be able to pay for healthcare due to missing work and staying home from school.
“Any natural immunity or vaccine immunity from 2023 has reached a nadir,” Hudson says. “This is sort of a perfect storm for a more infectious form of Covid.”
Typically, the largest surge of respiratory viruses occurs in the winter. The current surge in Covid is likely due to the emergence of new variants and waning protection of the previous vaccine, which tends to peak in winter and summer.
Like the influenza virus, SARS-CoV-2 is constantly changing. The Covid vaccines are also being updated similar to how flu vaccines are updated every year to adapt to the changing structure. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious disease at Kaiser Permanente Southern California says SARS-CoV-2 is changing faster than the flu virus, making it tricky to predict which variants will be dominant by the time the vaccine comes out. She says that it is spinning more quickly than the flu.
