The new bivalent Covid vaccines should help with a fall/winter surge, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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You may have already had two Covid vaccines plus boosters, and now are not feeling much urgency to get a new bivalent vaccine. Anna Durbin, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins, says the genetics of today’s circulating strains are very different from the ones the original vaccines were made for.

Durbin: Omicron is extremely divergent from the earlier strains of Covid. It sort of came out of it’s own family trees. It makes more sense to match your vaccine to what’s circulating. So I’m excited by it, I think it’s the thing that we need to do. I think what we’re going to see with that bivalent booster is better protection against symptomatic illness caused by Omicron, improved protection against infection in the short term. It won’t last a year. Hopefully out to four to six months which would be great. Maybe a little bit shorter.  :34

So get the new vaccine, Durbin says. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.