Mary Wilson
Well-known member
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.
01 September 2022
Ewen Callaway
In the coming days, people in the United States and the United Kingdom will be among the first to receive a new breed of COVID-19 vaccine. The hope was that these updated vaccines — based on Omicron variants — will offer substantially greater protection than older vaccines based on the virus that emerged in 2019. But an analysis[SUP]1[/SUP] suggests that updated boosters seem to offer much the same protection as an extra dose of the older vaccines — particularly when it comes to keeping people out of hospital.
“This is not some kind of super-shield against infection compared to what you could have got two weeks ago or a month ago,” says John Moore, a vaccine scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City who was not involved in the modelling study, posted to the medRxiv preprint server on 26 August. US and UK regulators should have taken the potential effectiveness of updated vaccines into account before authorizing them, Moore argues.
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. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02806-5
01 September 2022
Ewen Callaway
In the coming days, people in the United States and the United Kingdom will be among the first to receive a new breed of COVID-19 vaccine. The hope was that these updated vaccines — based on Omicron variants — will offer substantially greater protection than older vaccines based on the virus that emerged in 2019. But an analysis[SUP]1[/SUP] suggests that updated boosters seem to offer much the same protection as an extra dose of the older vaccines — particularly when it comes to keeping people out of hospital.
“This is not some kind of super-shield against infection compared to what you could have got two weeks ago or a month ago,” says John Moore, a vaccine scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City who was not involved in the modelling study, posted to the medRxiv preprint server on 26 August. US and UK regulators should have taken the potential effectiveness of updated vaccines into account before authorizing them, Moore argues.
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. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02806-5