Future Covid Shots Need Broader Coverage, FDA Vaccine Head Says

Covid-19 vaccine makers need to focus on broadening the protection of their annual boosters down the line to optimize uptake of future shots, the FDA’s vaccine chief said Tuesday.

“We need to get to something that has a broader breadth of protection, probably first and foremost, and a longer duration of action,” Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, said at the World Vaccine Congress. “Breadth is probably the most important thing because I think people will get an annual vaccine—if they think it’s going to protect them broadly.”

The annual flu shots offer a good model of “where we get into problems” when there’s a mismatch between what’s in the shot in the spring and what influenza strains are circulating six months later when flu season hits. “So I think breadth would be good. And then duration would be good, too,” he said.

Marks doesn’t expect the next round of Covid vaccines to be too different from the ones that are available right now “because we’re just not going to have time to get to a new generation.” But he said vaccine makers needs to be thinking about breadth and duration for future shots.

Factoring in manufacturing time, he said, the FDA will have to pick the coronavirus variant to focus on for the next shot around June. However, “what we know about SARS-CoV-2 is that it likes to do these funny things,” and there may be a variant that emerges over the summer that may become dominant. But he expects whatever formulation goes into the next booster will prevent against severe disease and hospitalization.

“In the event that the unthinkable happens, which is that some bizarre new reassortant occurs with SARS-CoV-2,” meaning that a new strain with genetic material from two or more similar viruses emerges, Marks said he expects they’ll be looking to mRNA vaccine manufacturers to make something the US can deploy as quickly as possible, “much the same way as we would have to do so if there was a pandemic flu strain. So that I think is what we have to just have in the back pocket.”