Top U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials on April 6 said the agency is aiming to decide by June whether to change the design of COVID-19 vaccines in order to combat future variants, even if it does not have all the necessary information to measure their effectiveness.

Current COVID-19 vaccines are not well-matched against the BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on April 6, as its panel of outside experts meets to discuss changes to future booster doses.

A fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine lowered rates of COVID-19 among the elderly but the protection against infection appeared short-lived, a large study in Israel found.

Moderna’s CEO Stéphane Bancel spoke at the Boston College Chief Executives Club on April 5. While COVID-19 vaccine production was a big talking point for the leader of Moderna, he also touched on how mRNA technology can usher us into a longer life span, saying that he tells all of his friends to “not die” in the next ten years.

It will take $15 billion in grants during 2022 and another $10 billion annually after that to establish and maintain an adequate toolkit to respond to COVID-19 and address future pandemic threats, according to four organizations focused on global health and the economy.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s expert advisers will discuss the timing of additional COVID-19 vaccine boosters and the people eligible for the extra shots in a meeting later this week, the health agency said on April 4.

Although people who recover from COVID-19 usually gain some immune defenses against reinfection, they get additional protection from vaccines, especially against severe disease, according to two studies published on March 31 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Additionally, two gold-standard trials published in The New England Journal of Medicine on March 30 help settle questions about two controversial therapies touted by many early in the pandemic with decidedly mixed results – failure for the antiparasite drug ivermectin and success for antibody-rich blood plasma from COVID-19 survivors.

Children ages 5 to 11 who received the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine were 68% less likely to be hospitalized during the Omicron wave in the United States than unvaccinated children, according to a study published on March 30.

The Biden administration on Wednesday launched a new website to provide a clearinghouse of information on COVID-19 as part of a continuing effort to prepare Americans to live with the coronavirus.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will weigh the benefits of authorizing a round of boosters of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to a broader population in the fall, a top official said on March 29.