President Joe Biden will deliver remarks on Thursday highlighting arrival of new COVID-19 vaccine boosters that have been updated to target the most common omicron strains currently in circulation.
The CDC's advisers struggled with who should get the new boosters and when because only a similarly tweaked vaccine, not the exact recipe, has been studied in people so far.
Comparing the tweak that has been studied in people and the one the U.S. actually will use,"it is the same scaffolding, part of the same roof, we’re just putting in some dormers and windows,” said Dr. Sarah Long of Drexel University. But those vaccines were designed to target the virus strain that circulated in early 2020. Effectiveness drops as new mutants emerge and more time passes since someone’s last shot. Since April, hospitalization rates in people over age 65 have jumped, the CDC said.
But “I just feel that this was a bit premature” given the absence of human data on how well it works, he said.
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