Two Omikron-adapted vaccines are likely to be approved on Thursday, one from Biontech/Pfizer and one from Moderna. Austria has secured one million quotas. The National Vaccination Panel recommends the fourth dose for everyone aged 12 and over.
Eight months after the announcement of its production, the vaccines from Biontech-Pfizer and Moderna adapted to Omikron are about to be approved in Europe. The European Medicines Agency EMA will decide on this at an extraordinary meeting on Thursday. Anything but the green light would be a big surprise, which is why the National Committee on Vaccination (NIG) updated its recommendations on Wednesday — not only should everyone over 60 be vaccinated a fourth time, but everyone with more than twelve years.
The approval process was carried out through continuous review. This means that data that has been delivered since mid-June has been continuously verified. As a prerequisite for submission, both companies carried out clinical studies, that is, they retested their vaccines in humans, although these were not newly developed, but only adapted to a new variant. For example, annual flu vaccines do not require clinical trials to be approved. The lab data is sufficient because they are killed vaccines that have been in use for decades — not mRNA vaccines like those from Biontech-Pfizer and Moderna.
What does the expected approval for the fourth vaccination mean? Do tailored vaccines offer better protection against infection? And when will they be available in Austria?