CDC: New vaccines still work on latest covid mutations

The latest tests show the new COVID vaccines will protect against what immunologists identify as the EG.5 variant and similar such coronavirus strains, health officials with the Centers for Disease Control said on Monday.

The newly formulated vaccine is what they call a “monovalent,” which uses just one viral component to target an omicron variant called XBB.1.5. That compares to previous boosters, which were bivalents, aimed at countering the original coronavirus strain as well as the BA.4 and BA.5 variants.

The bivalent Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are no longer authorized for use in the United States, the agency said. There were concerns that by attacking the disease on two vectors, as researchers tried initially, they actually sped up the disease’s mutation process and the risk of creating a potential super-virus immune to all vaccines.

Although the EG.5 variant is the most prevalent covid form out there currently, it’s seen in just 21% of the present cases nationally, according to the CDC.

New data released Monday by Pfizer, Moderna and independent scientists suggests the vaccine has proven successful with all known covid variants out there right now, the CDC doctors reported.

In fact, those studies also indicated that the new variants were nowhere near as dangerous as initially feared, the CDC also reported.

Concerns about the newer variants “appear to be a nothingburger,” said John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine. “It has been showing a very slow rate of increase, not an explosive event. If it were going to have a huge impact, we would know it by now.”

Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, said that with the continued evolution of the virus “updated vaccines will be critical to protecting the population this season.”