Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisers will meet Thursday to discuss simplifying the covid vaccination schedule, allowing most people to receive the currently available booster, regardless of how many doses they have received before.
The agency’s proposal was outlined in information documents posted online Monday.
Now, all from 6 months of age they must complete a primary vaccination series (at least two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Novavax vaccines or a single dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine) before they can receive a booster dose two months later.
The FDA is proposing to skip that primary series, which means most unvaccinated people could go ahead and get the last booster shot if they decide to get a covid shot.
However, some groups would be advised to receive two doses, according to the information documents. These include older adults, immunosuppressed people, and children 2 years of age and younger.
The FDA proposal, experts say, would greatly simplify the covid vaccination schedule in the United States, aligning it more closely with the annual flu shot.
In another similarity to the flu vaccine, the FDA is considering whether the Covid vaccine should be updated at least once a year, depending on which strains are in circulation.
The agency’s proposals will go before its Vaccines and Related Biologicals Advisory Committee on Thursday.
The committee will also discuss whether the primary series should be changed to the updated bivalent formulation used in the new booster shots. Those injections, licensed in the fall, offer protection against the omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, as well as the original strain of the coronavirus that was identified in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. The vaccines used in the primary series are only directed at the original strain.
Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said simplifying the Covid vaccine schedule makes sense.
Multiple formulations and vaccination schedules, he said, can complicate vaccine administration for pharmacists and can also discourage people from getting vaccinated.
Some patients, Durbin noted, have said they’ve had trouble finding pharmacies that still carry the original formulation of the vaccines, meaning they couldn’t get their primary series.
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said the FDA’s proposal to move away from the primary series is «reasonable,» noting that most people have some form of immunity from infection. previous covid, even if they haven’t. has not yet been vaccinated.
“From a human behavior standpoint, people who haven’t gotten the primary series with the vaccine at this point probably won’t get it,” he said. “You might get better buy-in if you say, ‘Listen, here’s a booster. Here is an opportunity.»