Health Canada approves new Moderna COVID-19 vaccine
Health Canada has approved a new version of Moderna’s Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine, which is expected to be rolled out alongside other COVID and flu shots this fall in a campaign public-health leaders hope will mitigate the toll of respiratory virus season.
The Canadian regulator gave the greenlight to the reformulated Moderna shot on Tuesday, one day after the United States Food and Drug Administration approved tweaked vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
Health Canada said in a statement Tuesday morning that it was still reviewing Pfizer-BioNTech’s revised vaccine, as well as a proposal for an updated shot from Novavax, which makes a protein-based vaccine for people who can’t or don’t want to take an mRNA shot.
The reformulated versions of all three vaccines target a sublineage of Omicron known as XBB.1.5, which was dominant through most of the spring and summer.
Although XBB.1.5 has already been eclipsed by another Omicron offshoot called EG.5, the revised shots are expected to hold up well against the latest variant, a close relative of the strain targeted by the shot.
Health leaders are hoping the combined flu and COVID vaccine campaign will help the country avoid a repeat of the 2022-2023 respiratory virus season, when a “tripledemic” of influenza, COVID and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) overwhelmed hospitals, particularly in the pediatric sector.
COVID was less of a factor in the overwhelming of children’s hospitals, which were filled to the brim with kids suffering serious cases of RSV and the flu after two seasons in which public-health measures such as lockdowns and mandatory masking kept those viruses at bay.
But COVID remains a threat to the oldest Canadians and others who are in poor health.
Health Canada’s announcement on Tuesday came as COVID infections and hospital admissions have begun to climb again, although at nowhere near the pace of the punishing early years of the pandemic.
The national test positivity rate, a decent barometer of spread at a time when relatively few people get lab tests for COVID, hit 13.4 per cent last week, up from 11.6 per cent at the end of August, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC.)
PHAC’s most recent data also show that 2,165 hospital beds across the country were occupied by COVID patients as of Sept. 5, up slightly from 2,125 a week earlier. At the height of the first Omicron wave in the winter of 2022, more than 10,000 people with COVID were in Canadian hospitals.
Canada is in a better position now thanks to widespread hybrid immunity. Most Canadians have had at least two doses of a vaccine and one or more bouts with COVID, which together prepare the immune system to fight off a fresh infection.
But immunity wanes over time, which is why Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recommended in June that everyone who is eligible for a COVID booster receive one made with the new recipe this fall if they haven’t had a shot or an infection in the last six months.
The challenge now will be convincing Canadians to get another COVID jab.
Uptake has waned with each subsequent booster. Nearly 90 per cent of Canadian adults have completed their primary vaccines series, which for the most common vaccines meant getting two doses.
But in the first six months of this year, just 6.6 per cent of adults received a COVID shot, according to PHAC data. Part of the reason for low uptake during that period is that most provincial governments, following the advice of NACI, focused their vaccination campaign last spring on the elderly and immunocompromised.
Still, only 22 per cent of people 80 and older – the demographic most likely to develop severe illness – received a COVID shot in the first half of this year.
This article was reported by The Globe and Mail
