In the United States, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved updated mRNA (messenger RNA) vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech that more precisely attack circulating coronavirus variants, amid a wave of infections.
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As Wired reported, these vaccines are aimed at a variant of Omicron called KP.2which is part of a set of variants called FLiRT. It is a new formula that aims to increase protection against hospitalization and death from Covid.
“Given the waning population immunity from prior exposure to the virus and prior vaccination, we strongly encourage those who qualify to consider receiving an updated COVID-19 vaccine,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.
Who should get the new vaccines?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the new vaccine be given to everyone 6 months of age and older, whether or not they have received a previous vaccine against Covid-19, because, as with the flu virus, SARS-CoV-2 is constantly changing, so measures to combat it are also being updated.
Experts say the new vaccine is especially important for people in vulnerable populations, such as those over 60 years of age. They also recommend getting the flu vaccine at the same time.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the new vaccine be given to everyone 6 months of age and older.
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“Most of the time, we recommend getting both the Covid vaccine and the flu vaccine more toward the end of September, October, to try to get people through the winter months,” Rosha McCoy, a pediatrician and senior director of health affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Wired. “Certainly if someone is high risk or is going to be in a high risk situation, they may want to get it earlier.”
Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, explains that SARS-CoV-2 changes more quickly than the flu virus, making it difficult to predict which variants will dominate when a vaccine comes out: “It’s changing variants faster than the flu,” Wired reported.
Although in the United States the increase in cases of respiratory viruses usually occurs in winter, at the end of the year, as far as Covid is concerned, there is a peak in both winter and summer. Experts attribute this latest increase to the emergence of new variants and the decrease in protection from the previous vaccine, explain the media specialized in science and technology.
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