President Joe Biden on Oct. 25 received a dose of a new COVID-19 booster and encouraged other Americans to get one of the unproven shots. Biden got a dose of a bivalent booster, which targets the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. No clinical data is available from trials for the boosters, which are made by…

An adviser to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during an interview advised young people not to receive the recently approved bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster doses due to a lack of human testing. Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, told CNN this weekend that he isn’t…

Western University said on Sept. 6 it will delay imposing a COVID-19 booster requirement due to Health Canada approving a new bivalent vaccine. The university in London, Ontario, announced in late August it would impose the booster on staff, faculty, students, and some visitors. It says the measures are “aimed at preserving the in-person learning…

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says increasing COVID-19 booster uptake among Canadians is important to reduce the need for the type of restrictions imposed in recent years as winter approaches. “If we are able to hit that 80, 85, 90 percent of Canadians up-to-date on their vaccinations, we’ll have a much better winter with much less…

The preclinical trial data for the just-authorized COVID-19 booster shots are based on just mice, not humans, because U.S. authorities believe waiting for human trial data would have made the updated boosters outdated. The data for Pfizer’s booster was based on just 8 mice, Pfizer scientists told the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine…

The preclinical data for the just-authorized COVID-19 booster shots are based on just mice, not humans, because U.S. authorities believe waiting for human trial data would have made the updated boosters outdated. The data for Pfizer’s booster was based on just 8 mice, Pfizer scientists told the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to clear new boosters this week for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines, even though the companies have not completed trials on human subjects and without the vaccine going before an advisory panel of doctors. The process of approval was set in motion on June 28…

Annual booster vaccination against COVID-19 may not be “a good use of resources,” the boss of major vaccine maker AstraZeneca has said. The UK health authorities are offering a booster jab to everyone over the age of 50 to protect them from COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases this winter. But Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive…

UK health authorities have said they will start the rollout of Moderna’s new vaccine against the Omicron COVID-19 variant in the first week of September. NHS England said care home residents and people who are housebound will be among the first to be vaccinated as the rollout begins from Sept. 5. A wider rollout is…

The UK has become the first country to approve Moderna’s new COVID-19 booster vaccine, which specifically targets the Omicron variant in addition to the original strain of the virus. The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced on Aug. 15 that the vaccine has been found to meet the UK regulator’s standards of…