The department on Friday announced an agreement to purchase 66 million doses of Moderna’s bivalent booster vaccine for possible fall and winter use. That’s in addition to the 105 million bivalent boosters the US government has bought from Pfizer.
The US Food and Drug Administration advised vaccine manufacturers in June to update the Covid-19 vaccine booster to add an Omicron BA.4/5 component to the current vaccine mix to create a bivalent booster.
The recordings should be available in October. But the New York Times reported Thursday that the updated footage could be available by mid-September, according to sources familiar with the deliberations.
Updated vaccinations would need to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CNN has reached out to Pfizer and Moderna for comment.
The Times reported that all adults are expected to be eligible for an updated second booster shot, and children may also be eligible.
Currently, people aged 5 and over are eligible for a first booster shot, but only those aged 50 and over and some immunocompromised people are eligible for a second booster shot.
As subvariant BA.5 began to increase the number of Covid-19 cases, federal officials had said the US was considering offering second boosters of the current coronavirus vaccines to people under the age of 50. The Times reported that officials agreed the goal should be to boost immunity in the fall, hopefully with a more potent booster.
At the end of June, the vaccine manufacturers said that the boosters updated to Omicron showed a stronger immune response than the current vaccines.
Taken together, the US government’s two agreements with Moderna and Pfizer would provide the US with approximately 171 million fall and winter bivalent vaccine booster doses if approved and recommended.
But the Biden administration added in its announcement on Friday that this would not be enough for every single US citizen. While both the Moderna and Pfizer agreements include options to purchase a total of 600 million doses — 300 million from each company — those options “can only be exercised with additional funding from Congress,” the announcement said.
“We look forward to receiving these new variant-specific vaccines and working with state and local health partners to make the vaccines available free of charge to communities across the country this fall,” said Dawn O’Connell, HHS assistant secretary, who is responsible for the Administration for Strategic Leads Preparedness and Response, in the HHS news release.
CNN’s Jacqueline Howard and Jamie Gumbrecht contributed to this report.