FDA Panel Recommends Updating COVID-19 Vaccines

Experts on June 15 recommended updating the COVID-19 vaccines due to the current slate performing worse against the XBB variant and its sublineages.
Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unanimously voted to recommend the FDA clear updated shots, less than one year after the vaccines were already updated due to concerns over waning protection.
“We need a better vaccine,” Dr. Eric Rubin, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the advisers, said.
The FDA cleared, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended, in the fall of 2022 bivalent vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer that include components of the Wuhan variant and the BA.4/BA.5 subvariants of the Omicron strain with the hope that the updated shots would provide better protection….