FDA ADVISERS TO DISCUSS FUTURE COVID VACCINE UPDATES — The FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee is scheduled to meet all day Thursday to discuss all things regarding future Covid-19 vaccines.
The official meeting agenda, which the agency made public yesterday, has only one vote scheduled. Advisers will vote on whether to recommend replacing the primary Covid-19 vaccine series with the updated bivalent boosters available from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
Annual boosters? The expert panel is slated to discuss a number of pressing matters related to future Covid boosters, including a potential yearly update to shots based on the most widely circulating variant.
The agency expects it would need to convene the vaccine advisory committee around June every year to discuss updating boosters that would be rolled out around September.
The FDA is asking the committee to discuss what information would be needed to update the boosters annually, including for this fall. The hope is that a routine immunization schedule, like the one for the flu, would lead to increased vaccine uptake.
“When you have recommendations that are changing, that can certainly lead to some confusion,” Neil Maniar, the director of the Master of Public Health Program at Northeastern University, told Prescription Pulse. “This is a really important opportunity … to kind of hit the reset button in a way, and to say ‘this is what it’s going to be like moving forward now for all of us.’”
New data drop: Biden administration officials are expected to release updated data this week on how bivalent vaccines fare against even newer variants, which will likely come up in the Thursday meeting.
“On Wednesday, we are expecting to release updated vaccine effectiveness data on how the bivalent boosters are protecting against XBB.1.5. The data we have seen are promising and reinforce how important vaccination is to protecting health,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in a Washington Post live chat on Monday.
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