It was just authorized in the U.K., for starters.
“We anticipate more durable protection against variants of concern with mRNA-1273.214, making it our lead candidate for a Fall 2022 booster,” Stéphane Bancel, chief executive officer of Moderna, said in a“Increasingly, people have desired protection not just against severe disease but against infection,” says infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
But while it’s important to have a booster vaccine that targets the strains that are currently circulating, it’s hard to say at this point how long they’ll provide protection for, says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York. “It remains to be seen how much mileage we'll get out of these boosters,” he says.