Advisors from the Food and Drug Administration will meet on Thursday to discuss simplifying the Covid vaccination schedule, allowing most people to receive the currently available booster regardless of how many doses they had previously received.
The proposal was outlined in briefing documents made available online on Monday.
Everyone aged 6 months and up must currently complete a primary vaccination series — at least two doses of either the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Novavax vaccines, or a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — before receiving a booster dose two months later.
The FDA is proposing to skip that primary series, which means that most unvaccinated people could get the most recent booster shot if they decided to get a Covid vaccine.
According to the briefing documents, some groups would still be advised to receive two doses. These include elderly people, immunocompromised people, and children aged 2 and under.
According to experts, the FDA’s proposal would greatly simplify the Covid vaccination schedule in the United States, bringing it more in line with the annual flu shot.
In a similar vein to the flu vaccine, the FDA is considering whether the Covid vaccine should be updated at least once a year, based on which strains are in circulation.
On Thursday, the agency’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will hear the proposals.
The committee will also consider whether the primary series should be updated to use the updated bivalent formula used in the new booster shots. These shots, which were approved in the fall, provide protection against the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, as well as the original strain of the coronavirus discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. The primary series vaccines are only effective against the original strain.
Dr. Anna Durbin, a vaccine researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, believes it makes sense to simplify the Covid vaccine schedule.
She believes that having multiple formulas and vaccination schedules complicates vaccine administration for pharmacists and discourages people from getting vaccinated at all.
Durbin noted that some patients have reported difficulty finding pharmacies that still carry the original formulation of the vaccines, preventing them from receiving their primary series.
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, called the FDA’s proposal to abandon the primary series “reasonable,” noting that most people have some immunity from a previous Covid infection even if they haven’t been vaccinated.
“From a human behaviour standpoint, people who have not received the primary series with the vaccine at this point in time are probably not going to receive it,” he added. “You might get better uptake if you say, ‘Listen, here’s a booster. Here’s one shot.”
