Covid, Palù: “We will evaluate the administration of an anti-Omicron vaccine for everyone in September”

Research against Covid 19 continues and could soon deliver us new vaccines capable of countering multiple sub-variants of the recent Omicron. For this reason, the president of the Italian Medicines Agency, Giorgiò Palù, taking stock of the new data from the Higher Institute of Health on 397 thousand reinfections with Sars-Cov-2 since the end of August, specified in an interview with The print that in September it will be considered whether to administer new anti-Omicron vaccines to the entire population.

Fourth dose, Moderna’s bivalent anti-Covid vaccines as possible candidates for the autumn booster

The US group is working on several fall recall products: the most advanced is Beta-based but the main candidate includes mRna which codes for Omicron’s Spike.

Moderna researchers, for example, are testing different bivalent products which combine the mRna encoding the Spike protein of the original vaccine with the mRna encoding the Omicron variant. The group is also experimenting with other monovalent boosters, i.e. vaccines similar to the previous ones but designed only on the Spike of the main Omicron strain.

The emeritus professor of virology at the University of Padua, as well as a former member of the CTS, then added that “the EMA recalled that for the entire population it is necessary to focus on vaccines updated to the circulating variants and sub-variants, in addition to searching in the long term period a polyvalent vaccine against all coronaviruses. When the first ones are approved, they will probably be evaluated in September, they can be done ».

The “new” symptoms of Covid-19 introduced by the Omicron variant

In the beginning there were only cough, fever and loss of taste and smell. But Omicron has taught us that the disease manifests itself in many other ways. Here is the symptom update introduced in the UK

Furthermore, according to Palù, it is necessary “trust current vaccines, which still protect very well against severe diseaseand hope for research to produce updated doses and increasingly effective drugs for the autumn “, specifying that” reinfections are yet another proof that it makes no sense to talk about herd immunity “and that the Sars-CoV-2 virus “will stay with us for a long time with a seasonal trend, so in October it will be strong again“.
However, according to President Aifa, it cannot be excluded that Omicron changes into a very different and more pathogenic variant, “but it would be a process contrary to the evolutionary fate of the virus which has so far lost its virulence and no longer infects the lungs”.

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