Human trials for Moderna’s vaccine targeting the subvariants have started, and for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are expected to start this month, the companies have said. Results won’t be available, however, before the U.S. government’s planned fall booster campaign.
“If we waited for clinical-trial results, thank you very much, we’d get them in the spring. It takes time to do clinical trials,” said William Schaffner, professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and a nonvoting liaison to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention committee that will decide whether to recommend the shots, should the FDA sign off. “This is just an updating of the previous vaccine that we used.”
The retooled shots are similar to the original shots, but customized to fight the latest variants, much like keys that are nearly identical but have slightly different ridges and valleys, said John Grabenstein, director of scientific communications for Immunize.org, a nonprofit that seeks to boost immunization rates.
The similarities make it very reasonable for regulators to weigh the overwhelmingly safe track record of the original series when considering the new shots, he said.
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