New Covid Shots Recommended for Americans 6 Months and Older This Fall

As the virus continues to mutate, scientific advisers to the C.D.C. are urging Americans to roll up their sleeves again for annual vaccinations.

24 comments

Is there newer vaccines than those in uh 2020-21?
- Yes, they've been updating the vaccine every year to match currently-circulating virus strains. This is about an additional update coming out this fall.
  
  Pretty much the same thing is done with flu vaccines, where you need a periodic update for it to be effective.
  
  I don't get why the shots cannot be combined. They talked about it and then nothing ever seem to materialize.
- Yup. Updates every year, just like flu vaccines. The virus mutates and immune wanes over time.
Do we have a new one yet?
- As the article says in the beginning, they come in fall.
  
  Yeah but that would require me reading it...
- No, not yet. There will probably be one in September or October.
  
  Perfect timing for our kids to bring home the latest variants and infect us before we get the updated vaccine. Idiotic.
It sucks that we're unlikely to get a vaccine targeting a difficult to change part of the virus by the established mRNA makers. We would probably need a new entity to do it.
- The vaccines initially did just that, it just turns out it was able to adapt anyway or they were wrong.
  
  I don't know whether they even had any data on change difficulty. I think it was more like - we needed a vaccine yesterday and Moderna and BioNTech had the mRNA technology just ready to be able to spin up a vaccine quickly. And that was good enough to save a lot of people from severe disease.

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