The Food and Drug Administration gave its approval Monday to new updated Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna that are specially designed to protect against the latest dominant strain of the coronavirus, Omicron variant XBB.1.5—the latest effort of drugmakers, regulators and doctors to keep up with the virus’ ever evolving nature.
Anyone 5 or older is eligible to receive a single booster dose of the newly updated vaccines regardless of how many shots they’ve received before, as long as it’s at least 2 months since the last dose they received of any Covid-19 vaccine, the FDA announced.
Children between the ages of six months and four years are eligible to receive one or two doses of the new vaccines if they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19 before, but if they’ve never received a vaccine, they’re eligible to receive three doses of the new Pfizer-BioNTech shot or two doses of Moderna, the FDA said.
Now that the FDA has approved the drugs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to decide whether it will recommend people receive the new booster shots, an additional standard regulatory step that each of the previous iterations of the vaccines have had to complete.
This comes after the new XBB lineage of coronavirus, a group of new variants that emerged in late 2022, became the most common strain.
After the emergence of this new lineage, the FDA encouraged Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Novavax to create new vaccines specialized to defend against it, though the FDA had not approved Novavax’s vaccine yet.
This is a developing story and will be updated.