On Thursday, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (or VRBPAC) met to discuss the future of COVID-19 vaccines. While the committee readily agreed that our current, Omicron-specific shots are working well and should be used more broadly, it had a hard time answering other questions about future vaccine regimens—largely due to a lack of good data.
Sources and updates for the week of December 4 include new CDC grants to support public health infrastructure, breakthrough COVID-19 deaths, monoclonal antibodies, and more.
We are beginning to see the impacts of colder weather and new variants this week, as both official COVID-19 cases and new hospital admissions went up slightly: increasing by 6% and 5% from the prior week, respectively. Wastewater monitoring similarly shows an uptick in coronavirus transmission at the national level, according to Biobot’s dashboard. The Northeast still has the highest virus concentration, but other regions of the country are catching up.
New, Omicron-specific booster shots are publicly available for all American adults who’ve been previously vaccinated. But awareness of the shots and uptake so far are both incredibly low.
Sources and updates for the week of September 25 include new booster shot data, CDC funding for COVID-19 testing and genomic surveillance, Long COVID studies, and more.