This Is What You Need to Know about How Updated COVID Vaccines Are Keeping Us Safe
It’s always a good time to get current on your COVID-19 vaccinations. Health experts note that the science on vaccination is clear. It lowers your chances of catching COVID in the first place. More important: if you do get infected, vaccination dramatically lowers your risk of developing the severe symptoms that would put you in the hospital or result in your death.
COVID Is Still Taking a Grim Toll
Yet as of the fall/winter 2023-2024 season, only a small percentage of people in the United States have received the latest formulation of the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. For only the last week of December 2023, COVID was responsible for more than 34,000 hospital admissions nationwide. In addition, 3.6 percent of all deaths in the country that week were due to COVID.
Vaccine Updates to the Rescue
Every fall/winter season, the US Food and Drug Administration approves a new version of the COVID vaccine. The tweaks to the vaccine, just as with the more-familiar flu vaccines, are based on the variants of the virus expected to be dominant in circulation during the fall and winter months. For fall/winter 2023-2024, the only COVID vaccines available for approved use are the monovalent—designed to fight one specific variant—vaccines specifically targeting the XBB.1.5 variant. The good news is that laboratory tests show this monovalent vaccine also recognizes and responds to other emerging variants.
As of January 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that every American aged 5 years and older get an updated vaccination against COVID. To date, the CDC has approved COVID vaccines manufactured by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Novavax. The agency states that it does not recommend any one of these vaccines over any other: they are equally effective. For people with serious immunodeficiencies or other illnesses, a doctor may recommend additional vaccinations.
For the youngest patients, aged 6 months to 4 years, multiple COVID vaccinations are necessary for effective protection. At least one of these should be the most recent iteration of the vaccine available.
The Long Shadow of Omicron
While the original omicron strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is no longer circulating, it has left us some hardy offspring. The start of the New Year of 2024 brought increasing concerns about the newest omicron variant. At the close of 2023, the JN.1 variant was responsible for only a small fraction of the total number of COVID cases in the country. Two months later, and JN.1 was causing an estimated 60 percent of cases.
For one thing, JN.1 is a descendant of SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.2.86. This one piqued scientists’ interest because it was so multifaceted in its potential to infect: BA.2.86 contained some three dozen mutations designed to get past people’s immune defenses. That’s the most such mutations in a single variant detected up to its time. BA.2.86 didn’t beat out the other COVID variants circulating in the summer of 2023. However, JN.1 has retained BA.2.86’s ability to get past our immune defenses. Further, it has developed the additional capacity to transmit with notably greater efficiency by simply going through another mutation or two.
The good news is that JN.1 doesn’t seem to produce symptoms much different than those associated with other omicron variants. It doesn’t appear to result in a significantly worse experience of disease, either. Our existing tests and vaccine defenses are holding up against JN.1 very well. Current tests can detect it, and the vaccines rolled out over the fall and winter of 2023 can still decrease the risk of both catching COVID and of experiencing severe disease.
A Continuing Calibration
In mid-December, the World Health Organization recommended continued use of the newest XBB.1.5-focused vaccines, since they appear not only to target and neutralize XBB.1.5, but BA.2.86 and JN.1. The immune response noted in serologic testing showed that this held true regardless of whether a person had been previously infected with COVID or not. The WHO committee did add that it may be beneficial soon to include vaccine formulations specifically targeting other variants, including the original XBB, as well as BA.2.86 and its descendants.
At the start of October, the Food and Drug Administration updated its COVID vaccine authorization protocols to include the 2023-2024 adjuvanted—meaning capable of boosting immune response—version of the two-dose Novavax vaccine. Updated Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for 2023-2024 were approved the previous month.
This new Novavax vaccine can be used to protect individuals aged 12 years and older who received any previous authorized COVID vaccine, who are immunocompromised, and those who have never received any COVID vaccine. The original version of the adjuvanted Novavax vaccine thus dropped off the FDA’s officially authorized list. Because the Novavax product is protein-based, it offers a safer alternative for people who cannot or will not take the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer.