Updated COVID jabs have been approved in the United States and United Kingdom, but they offer roughly the same protection as existing vaccines, a study suggests.
On 15 August, the United Kingdom became the first country to approve these ‘bivalent’ vaccines, which are based on the Omicron BA.1 lineage and the original SARS-CoV-2 sequence identified in Wuhan, China, and will soon roll them out. And this week, the US government is expected to greenlight similar bivalent vaccines.Largescale efficacy trials showed that the first generation of COVID-19 vaccines reduced the risk of disease by more than 90%.
To try to make sense of results like Moderna’s, a team led by Deborah Cromer, a mathematical modeller at the University of South Wales in Sydney, Australia, collected all the updated vaccine trial results they could find, as well as studies of fourth doses of the original vaccine. For instance, in a population where half of people are already protected against a symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection through previous vaccines and infection, an updated vaccine booster bumped protection up to 90%, compared with 86% protection provided by an extra dose of the original vaccine. For protection against severe disease, the differences in protection were a few tenths of a percent .
But Cromer’s analysis suggests the differences might be paltry. Even updated vaccines based on the Beta and Delta variants should protect against BA.4 and BA.5 infections nearly as well as vaccines based on those variants. Similarly, bivalent vaccines that included the original vaccine looked no more effective than vaccines based solely on a newer variant.
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