British drug regulators have become the first in the world to authorize an updated version of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine that aims to protect against the original virus and the omicron variant.
In a statement on Monday, the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency said it had given the green light to Moderna's combination "bivalent" vaccine, which will be used as an adult booster shot.
Stephane Bancel, Moderna's Chief Executive, said in a statement that it was the first regulatory authorization for a vaccine aiming to fight the omicron variant, predicting the booster would have an "important role" to play in protecting people against COVID-19 in the winter. In June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told vaccine makers that any booster shots tweaked for the fall would have to include protection against the newest omicron variants, meaning BA.4 and BA.5, not the BA.1 subvariant included in Moderna's latest shot.
According to the World Health Organization, the latest global surge of COVID-19 has been driven by omicron subvariant BA.5, which is responsible about 70% of the virus samples shared with the world's largest public virus database. The subvariant BA.5 is even more infectious than the original version of omicron and has some genetic differences that earlier vaccines might not address.
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