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The U.S. has reached an important milestone in the pandemic, according to federal health officials.
Going forward, COVID-19 could be treated more like the flu, with one annual shot offering year-long protection against severe illness for most people.
“Barring any new variant curve balls, for a large majority of Americans we are moving to a point where a single, annual COVID shot should provide a high degree of protection against serious illness all year,” said White House COVID response coordinator Ashish Jha at a press briefing Tuesday.
The federal government has started rolling out a new round of boosters for the fall — they are updated versions of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines targeting both the original coronavirus and the two omicron subvariants that are currently causing most infections.
These vaccines could be tweaked again if new variants become dominant in the future, which is how the flu shot works. Every fall, people get a new flu vaccine designed to protect against whatever strains of the virus are likely to be circulating that season. The hope is the COVID boosters will act the same way.
Jha cautioned that older people and those with health problems that make them more vulnerable to severe disease may need to get boosted more often.
