August 31, 2022
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized new boosters today for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shots, even though the companies have not completed trials on human subjects and without the injections going before an advisory panel of doctors.
The FDA announced today that it has “amended the emergency use authorizations (EUAs) of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine to authorize bivalent formulations of the vaccines for use as a single booster dose at least two months following primary or booster vaccination. The bivalent vaccines, which we will also refer to as ‘updated boosters,’ contain two messenger RNA (mRNA) components of SARS-CoV-2 virus, one of the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the other one in common between the BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.”