Can the new boosters end the pandemic?
Are we finally moving on from “outdated” vaccines? (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
With new subvariants popping up almost every week like Shein microtrends, you must be thinking: “They are doing something about our boosters, right?” Don’t worry, they are.
Right now, Pfizer and Moderna are working on new bivalent boosters, or a vaccine mix of the old formula plus a new one that targets the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. If they’re approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Americans could receive the updated boosters by September.
Current boosters are made from the original strain of the virus, but still offer 76.5% effectiveness against Omicron, according to a study from the New England Journal of Medicine. The COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub projects that the new boosters can offer about 80% efficacy if no new variant comes along and enough people get it together with their flu shots.
Microtrends won't get us anywhere
Now you’re probably thinking: “So the new boosters can finally end the pandemic, right?” We wish, but not really.
Dr. Michael Chang, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston, said minimizing cases with the new vaccines is "kind of lost." The best it could do is keep hospitalizations and deaths down.
On top of that, it's impossible to tell how things will look by September when the new boosters are available. Which variant will be dominant? How different will it be from the ones we’re already dealing with? And how many people would be sick by then?
Moderna is currently developing a booster based on the original and BA.1 strains for the EU, the UK, and Australia. Though BA.1 is largely extinct, results showed Moderna’s booster still has "significantly higher neutralizing antibody responses" against BA.4 and BA.5 compared to our current boosters.
Pfizer has been working on different vaccines for the EU and the US, as well. University of Michigan epidemiologist Arnold Monto said “the answer is not to chase [the variants]” but to “broaden” the immunity we have against them. Kind of like how you can’t build a sustainable wardrobe out of Shein hauls alone, a population that’s immune to various, “outdated” strains of COVID ahead of time is already better off than one that’s constantly waiting for an “updated” shot—while not getting boosted at all.
Getting by on the "human condition"
We’re probably making you think a lot, so by now you must be wondering, “Where’s my second booster?”
Despite a study showing a fourth shot can slash infection risk by two-thirds, we (the general population, aged 12 to 49) never actually heard back from pandemic authorities. And that’s made it too late for a number of private companies to use up P5 to 13 billion worth of expiring doses to date.
It all adds up. What started as a grand plan to spread the first boosters out across the population was met with poor uptake all over the world. This led to waning immunity from last year’s primary vaccines, and COVID basically grabbing us by the scruffs of our necks and going, “Thought you’d seen the last of me? Guess again.”
The OCTA Research Group projects the Philippines’ current wave to last till the “ber” months. As of Saturday, Metro Manila’s positivity rate has jumped to 17.5% in the past week, with more than 4,000 new cases each day. High positivity rates were also recorded in 20 provinces.
BA.5 is currently driving surges everywhere—and we’re not even getting the full numbers at this point. Who doesn’t know someone who tested positive on an at-home kit within the past few weeks? Exactly.
We don’t expect to get a share of the new boosters any time soon, so we’ll have to tough this one out as we do with many other events these days. With no new Department of Health Secretary in sight, and officer-in-charge Maria Rosario Vergeire’s term already expired as of July 31, we can only hope what we have now can tide us through the rest of the year relatively unscathed.
From everything we’ve learned so far, people can be just as unpredictable as the virus. This newsletter is also as much about the “human condition” as it is about other diseases, after all. But that never stopped us from believing this stubbornness can be productive by its own right.
