biden administration expand covid vaccine production

#Biden administration expand covid vaccine production full#

Monoclonal antibody therapies, Pfizer’s Paxlovid, and Merck’s molnupiravir are also available only under EUAs.

#Biden administration expand covid vaccine production full#

While the base two-dose series of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for adults now have full FDA approval, booster doses and vaccines for children are only available under EUAs.

Facilitate Medicare and Medicaid coverage of items available under emergency use authorizations (EUAs): The FDA has made many COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics available via EUAs rather than its regular approval process.

This means that developing and manufacturing new vaccines and therapeutics-and ensuring continued easy access to existing ones-remains an urgent need. Moreover, the emergence of the Omicron variant showed that changes in the virus pose a serious threat to the effectiveness of existing vaccines and therapeutics: existing vaccines are less effective against Omicron, and some monoclonal antibody therapies are entirely ineffective. Existing vaccines, while highly effective, wane in effectiveness over time, so periodic booster doses will likely be needed for the foreseeable future indeed, older US adults are now being encouraged to receive a fourth dose. It is now clear that will not be the case. There may once have been hopes that a one-time vaccine rollout would produce durable herd immunity against COVID-19 in the United States, causing COVID-19 to fade into the background or disappear completely. A second lesson is that pandemic is dynamic, and what works today will not necessarily work tomorrow.