Biden administration plans for Omicron booster open to all in September
Amid rising COVID cases due to the latest Omicron subvariant, the Biden administration has announced plans for an updated booster shot available to the general public in September.
Video Transcript
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DAVE BRIGGS: The Biden administration plans to roll out updated COVID booster shots in September. Anjalee Khemlani here with the latest on that. How much of this is aimed at combating the BA.5, which is now, I think, the predominant strain.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: It is. It's more than 80% here and across the country. And of course, that is based on undercounting. So it could be much higher. Cases could be much higher. We're now at more than 130,000 cases as the daily average, and that's pretty high. That pretty much matches what we saw last summer as well. And we know that was a pretty concerning time before the winter really blew that out of the water.
The US government right now has 171 million doses combined of Moderna and Pfizer and is aiming to do that bivalent. So that's combination of the original strain and the BA.5 strain for that September rollout. We know that the companies have said, however, that they might not be able to meet that deadline.
We know earlier on, during an FDA meeting, they did say October or November is when they would have those doses available. So it's going to remain to be seen whether or not they can meet that September goal. We do know that that strain-- targeting the BA.5 strain is a good strategy for now. But we don't know what variant might pop up before then. So it's a little bit of a gamble, but the best bet right now to do that BA.5. We know that Europe is targeting Omicron, so they're basically working on two different things right now.
