The FDA recently set its sights on modified vaccines aimed at two of omicron’s subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, which now account for about 70 percent of confirmed cases.
“It just seems dangerous to overly bureaucratize the rollout of an updated vaccine,” virologist Jeremy Kamil, PhD, told the Times. “If a bank robber [has] grown a beard and dyed their hair, it’s going to help your response to know what they look like today rather than when they were 14 years old.”
Trevor Bedford, PhD, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, is also worried about the projected monthslong wait.
“The more time that passes, the more likely it is that anything new is going to emerge from omicron,” Dr. Bedford told the Times.
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