New boosters that target Omicron may be our most important COVID vaccines since 2020—but the U.S. may be setting up the new shots to fail.
From the Atlantic by Katherine J. Wu:
America’s first-ever reformulated COVID-19 vaccines are coming, very ahead of schedule, and in some ways, the timing couldn’t be better. Pfizer’s version of the shot, which combines the original recipe with ingredients targeting the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, may be available to people 12 and older as early as the week after Labor Day; Moderna’s adult-only brew seems to be on a similar track.
The schedule slates the shots to debut at a time when BA.5 is still the country’s dominant coronavirus morph—and it means that, after more than a year of scrambling to catch up to SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary capers, we might finally be getting inoculations that are well matched to the season’s circulating strains. Which is “absolutely great,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona.
In other ways, the timing couldn’t be worse. Emergency pandemic funds have been drying up, imperiling already dwindling supplies of vaccines; with each passing week, more Americans are greeting the coronavirus with little more than a shrug. The most recent revamp of the country’s pandemic playbook has softened or stripped away the greater part of the remaining mitigation measures that stood between SARS-CoV-2 and us. Calls for staying up-to-date on COVID vaccines are one of the last nationwide measures left—which puts a lot of pressure on shot-induced immunity to combat the virus, all on its own.
The nation has latched on before to the idea that shots alone can see us through. When vaccines first rolled out, Americans were assured that they’d essentially stamp out transmission, and that the immunized could take off their masks. “I thought we learned our lesson,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University. Apparently we did not. America is still stuck on the notion of what Popescu calls “vaccine absolutism.” And it rests on two very shaky assumptions, perhaps both doomed to fail: that the shots can and should sustainably block infection, and that “people will actually go and get the vaccine,” says Deshira Wallace, a public-health researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As fall looms, the U.S. is now poised to expose the fatal paradox in its vaccine-only plan. At a time when the country is more reliant than ever on the power of inoculation, we’re also doing less than ever to set the shots up for success.
In terms of both content and timing, the fall shot will be one of the most important COVID vaccines offered to Americans since the initial doses. Since SARS-CoV-2 first collided with the human population nearly three years ago, it’s shape-shifted. The coronavirus is now better at infecting us and is a pretty meh match for the original shots that Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson produced. An updated vaccine should rejuvenate our defenses, prodding our antibody levels to soar and our B cells and T cells to relearn the virus’s visage.
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