The panel — the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) — recommended that the next round of COVID vaccinations should only include protection aimed at the XBB strains.
“For practical purposes, you can see that this current selection will likely take us into the new year and hopefully we won’t have something appear in the next two or three months that will require us to scramble,” committee member Peter Marks, director of the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said Thursday.
While the FDA is not required to abide by the committee’s recommendations, it almost always does so.
The public health emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic has since expired, and federal health officials now have the challenge of predicting which strain of SARS-CoV-2 will be dominant in the U.S. this coming winter when respiratory viral infections rise.
This winter will be the first test to see if the U.S. can effectively treat COVID-19 similarly to how it treats the influenza virus, with an annually updated vaccine tailored to combat the latest mutations.
During the meeting on Thursday, representatives from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax said they will have the supplies for an XBB-specific vaccine campaign this winter.
The panel did not choose a specific subvariant of the XBB variant to target.
