The Biden administration plans to offer updated COVID-19 booster shots in September, an administration official confirmed to NBC News on Friday.
The new vaccines will be reformulated to perform better against the now dominant, and extremely contagious, omicron subvariant BA.5, and also the BA.4 subvariant.
Pfizer and Moderna said they’ll have the retooled boosters ready by the fall, and the federal government has purchased millions of doses to allocate to the public, but it’s not enough to inoculate every American.
News of the fall rollout of updated boosters was first reported by The New York Times.
BA.4 and BA.5 — considered the most contagious forms of the virus to date — made up more than 90% of all new Covid cases in the United States for the week ending July 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Health officials have raced to address the aggressive subvariants, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month recommending that vaccine manufacturers update their shots to target BA.4 and BA.5.
On Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense announced an agreement to purchase 66 million doses of Moderna’s bivalent COVID-19 vaccine
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