New Covid Boosters Aren't Better Than Old Shots at Neutralizing Omicron BA.5, Early Studies Find

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New Covid Boosters Aren't Better Than Old Shots at Neutralizing Omicron BA.5, Early Studies Find
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Two independent studies suggest the new COVID booster shots don’t protect better against omicron BA.5 than the original vaccines

The White House, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have repeatedly expressed confidence that the new boosters will provide better protection than the old shots. This is because they are bivalent shots that directly target the dominant variant, omicron BA.5, as well as the original Covid strain that emerged in China in 2019.

Instead, the FDA relied on human data from a similar vaccine that targets the first version of omicron, BA.1. Pfizer and Moderna were originally developing their new boosters against BA.1, but the FDA asked the companies to switch gears and target BA.5 as that subvariant became dominant over the summer.

The agency was acting with urgency to get the new boosters out by the fall in the hope that they would help head off a major Covid surge. Hotez said it might be possible to overcome immune imprinting, if it is in fact a problem, by giving a second dose of the BA.5 shot at some point. In other words, the booster might not push a stubborn immune system trained to recognize wild type to shift gears and attack a new variant the first time around. But a second dose could convince it to produce antibodies against BA.5.

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