Moderna hopes to offer new COVID vaccine booster in the fall to protect against variants
In its quarterly earnings report Thursday, Moderna Therapeutics laid out its vision for COVID-19 booster shots going forward.
The company envisions a vaccine that can protect against at least two variants of the pandemic-causing coronavirus and eventually, combining it with vaccines against other seasonal respiratory viruses, like the flu.
The company expects booster shots – fourth doses for many people – will be needed again this fall, as immunity from previous shots and infections with omicron fade, president Stephen Hoge said in a webinar.
Any vaccine booster will need to go through the same federal authorization process as the COVID-19 vaccine and previous boosters.
The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not yet considered whether to recommend additional boosters for the general public, or what a booster should look like. (People with weakened immune systems, generally because of cancer treatment, organ transplantation or certain medications, are already entitled to fourth shots, because the first three are considered their primary vaccination series.)
Moderna is considering three options for a booster: a repeat of its original vaccine, an omicron-specific vaccine and a shot that combines vaccines against the original strain and the omicron variant, Hoge said.
In a 750-person trial in the U.S., Moderna is evaluating an omicron-specific versus a combination vaccine as a third or fourth dose. In a 3,000-person trial in the U.K., the company is comparing all three options.
Boosters are likely to be needed, Moderna's chief medical officer, Paul Burton said, because protection is likely to fade over time, particularly against the omicron variant, which is quite different from the original version of the virus.
"While we are hopeful that we are about to enter a period of relative stability in the Northern Hemisphere, we believe firmly that a vaccine booster dose will be required for the fall of 2022, to provide ongoing protection against this virus," Burton said.
Hoge said earlier data on the beta variant suggests that a vaccine combining two variants will provide stronger and longer-lasting protection than a single-variant vaccine.
For the last year, the focus of vaccination has been to protect everyone against a virus their bodies have never seen before.
But in the "endemic" phase the world is entering now, Hoge said, the focus needs to be on seasonal protection against waning immunity, especially for high-risk groups like older adults and the immunocompromised.
That's why Moderna is interested in combining COVID-19 vaccinations with other seasonal viruses, like the flu, respiratory syncytial virus and another coronavirus, called Endemic Human Coronavirus, which already causes severe disease annually, particularly among people over 80.
"We believe nobody should be hospitalized because of a respiratory virus," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said. "We have the technology to do that."
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Moderna hopes to offer multi-variant COVID-19 booster in the fall
