Wall S Journal. May 26 – Thanks to Ed M.
Health authorities and vaccine makers are moving toward targeting the next shot on one of the newest forms of the virus now dominant in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter.
Under consideration for the next booster, the people said, are Omicron offshoots known as XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16, which is nicknamed Arcturus. Also under consideration is XBB.2.3, though it isn’t as prevalent as the other two strains and is similar to XBB.1.16, one of the people said.
Vaccine experts advising the Food and Drug Administration are scheduled to meet next month to make a recommendation on the strain to target. Pharmaceutical companies would then make the shots in time for a fall vaccination campaign.
The health authorities and vaccine makers are completing the form of the next Covid-19 shot after the U.S. and the World Health Organization ended their states of emergency for the pandemic.
The plans for the booster, which Americans would take annually like a flu shot, are a sign that health authorities consider the coronavirus a threat though they have dropped many of the precautions recommended during the pandemic crisis.
Hospitalizations and deaths from the virus have fallen, but it is still killing hundreds of people a week in the U.S., and remains especially risky for the elderly and frail.
A new Covid-19 shot targeting a single strain would represent a shift from the latest version of the vaccine, called a bivalent vaccine because it aimed at both the original virus strain and an Omicron subvariant that was dominant in the U.S. at the time.
A WHO advisory panel last week recommended that updated booster shots target one of the dominant XBB variants circulating.
Companies that make the widely used messenger RNA vaccines—Moderna as well as Pfizer and its partner BioNTech—have said they are prepared to deliver updated vaccine doses in time for a fall booster campaign.
BioNTech plans to develop a vaccine targeting the XBB virus line, Chief Executive Ugur Sahin said this week at a company shareholder meeting. A Moderna spokesman said its fall boosters would target the latest variants of concern, as regulators advise.
Pfizer said it is looking forward to the FDA’s advisory meeting in June to share the company’s efforts and understand proposed next steps for the fall.
Novavax, which produces a vaccine that is authorized for use in the U.S. with a more traditional technology, is also working on a shot for the fall campaign. Novavax is focusing its development on the XBB.1.5 strain for the fall, a spokeswoman said.
The country’s booster campaign has been sluggish. Roughly 17% of the U.S. population has received the updated bivalent booster, with about 43% of people over age 65 getting a bivalent shot.
Surveys have cited pandemic fatigue and hesitancy as contributing to the vaccination pace that has lagged behind the initial campaign that began in late 2020.
The original Covid-19 shots that rolled out in 2020 targeted the ancestral strain of the virus.
The U.S. recently decided that people getting their first doses of mRNA vaccines would only need a single dose instead of two.
Write to Jared S. Hopkins at jared.hopkins@wsj.com and Liz Essley Whyte at liz.whyte@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
XBB.1.16 is the name of an Omicron subvariant. An earlier version of this article misspelled the name as XBB.1.6 in one sentence. (Corrected on May 26)