What if another variant arrives before the updated vaccines?

This gets at one of the biggest arguments against the updated vaccine strategy. There was no Omicron variant a year ago, when the Delta variant was the most dominant and worrisome strain in the world. The world’s first BA.5 wave hit South Africa in March, while the U.S. was still dealing with the BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 subvariants.

The coronavirus is evolving rapidly, with new strains emerging and rising to dominance faster than at any previous point in the pandemic. Will the next big variant be a descendant of BA.5 or some other continuation of the Omicron lineage, or will it be something completely different? A reformulated vaccine can target a new variant, but only a number of months after it appears, and the virus doesn’t sit still.

That doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to get boosted with a dose of the reformulated vaccine, even if there is a new variant by the time you can. But betting billions of dollars of scarce federal funding on a game of variant Whac-A-Mole is not without risk.