Pharmaceutical manufacturers are investigating how their vaccines might
protect against the omicron COVID-19 variant.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday that President
Joe Biden’s administration is in talks with Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer
about plans that have multiple contingencies.
“One is to rev up the production of the vaccines that they already have.
The next is to make, for example, a bivalent, where you have the vaccine
against both the ancestral strain and the new variant. And the other is to make
a variant specific boost,” Fauci said.
If a new booster is needed,
Fauci said the Food and Drug
Administration would decide the regulatory process. He said it could fall under
the same criteria as the flu vaccines, where they change yearly based on the
most prevalent strains.