CDC signs off on 2nd dose of omicron Covid booster for older adults
Source: NBC News
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday backed a second dose of the updated Covid booster for older adults and people with weakened immune systems. The recommendation is in line with the Food and Drug Administration, which authorized the additional dose on Tuesday.
Those 65 and older can get a second dose of the updated versions of Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s Covid booster at least four months after their last dose, the FDA said in a statement. Most people who are immunocompromised can get an additional dose at least two months after their last dose, according to the agency.
The move by the CDC came hours after the agency's advisory panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, met to discuss the changes authorized by the FDA. The CDC sign off means shots could begin immediately.
Following the FDA, the CDC also recommended using the bivalent formula in all Covid vaccines moving forward and is doing away with the multidose primary series for people who have not yet been vaccinated. That means people who haven’t been vaccinated yet would get single doses of the updated vaccine.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-omicron-booster-2nd-dose-older-adults-rcna79568
This would be another dose of the current bivalent not an updated version one (that hasn't been decided yet).
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that killed a million Americans in three years?
To give a comparison of the severity of COVID (and mortality from the pneumona it can cause) vs the flu (and the pneumonia that it can cause), see this chart (done regularly and the below covers 2018 - the end of 2022) -
From here - https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html
I circled the flu deaths in green (the peaks are orange) and you can compare with the blue peaks for COVID (they use 2 different colors of blue as they switch between years).
The red line traces the % of the combined pneumonia deaths (from COVID and flu).
The issue here being that COVID impacts so many vital organs AND it mutates as much if not more than flu. So it is obvious that getting it without having the body able to mount an effective, if any immune response to fight it off, can lead to a severe outcome (and that is the purpose of multiple more shots for certain individuals because their bodies don't or can't mount a defense without some boosting).
And note that nowadays, when you get a flu shot, they do it as a trivalent or quadrivalent, so they have multiple types in the one shot. The flu vaccine has been out for a long time now and the body has been exposed to Influenza A's & B's many variants over that period, so the body is "familiar" with it.
However, COVID-19 has only been circulating for going on 4 years, so although the claims are that it is "endemic", it really isn't yet, and the human body is slowly adapting to deal with it.
