New COVID-19 Vaccines Shipping Soon, After Rapid Pivot To Address New Strain

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna rapidly adapted Comirnaty and Spikevax for the 2024-2025 season to address the KP.2 variant after the US FDA had advised them to target JN.1 in June.

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The rapid change to the latest versions of Pfizer Inc./BioNTech SE’s Comirnaty and Moderna, Inc.’s Spikevax vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 illustrates the likelihood that they will maintain their leading market positions for vaccines to prevent COVID-19, given the “plug-and-play” properties of messenger RNA vaccines that allow much more rapid development than their traditional counterparts.

The US Food and Drug Administration said 22 August that it had approved and granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to the updated versions of the vaccines, which include a monovalent component that corresponds to variant KP.2 of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. The FDA had advised manufacturers in June that the vaccines should be monovalent JN.1 vaccines

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