Column by Dr. Richard Sternberg
New COVID Vaccine
Offers Broader Protection
On Wednesday August 31 the FDA authorized, for emergency use, two new, bivalent, COVID vaccines. Bivalent means that each shot contains two variants of the vaccine. The following day the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ (ACIP) recommended the use of those vaccines and the same day, CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, M.D., M.P.H., endorsed the committee’s recommendations for use of updated COVID-19 boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech for people ages 12 years and older, and from Moderna for people ages 18 years and older. Updated COVID-19 boosters add Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 spike protein components to the current vaccine composition, helping to restore protection that has waned since previous vaccination by targeting variants that are more transmissible and able to avoid immune responses.
Currently about 89% of circulating virus in the United States is Omicron BA.5 and almost all the rest is BA.4 and BA.4.6. Both vaccines are RNA types, that is it gets the body’s cells to manufacture antibodies to the COVID virus spike protein but do not affect the body’s cell’s DNA. The virus itself does not make up these vaccines unlike the case with polio, which is either dead virus or live-attenuated virus (see this column’s article of September 24.)
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