contagious omicron sub variants ba.4 and b 5. let s talk about this with the director of vaccine education center at the children s hospital of gill fill dr. paul offit. he is also a member of the fda s vaccine advisory committee. great to have you this morning. this timeline it s pretty quick. this realistic? again, i think we the fda vaccine advisory committee were presented data on a vaccine on june 28th. at that time the vaccines presented by moderna and pfizer had the omicron variant. so in other words it was ba.1, not the ba.4, ba.5, but the data were pretty underwhelming. i think if we re going to launch this program in september or opt using a vaccine containing ba.4, ba.5 we will have to see data in people showing that you have an immune response that is dramatically better than what we saw at the end of june before we do that. i think the american public is
Almost as a silver-lining (if one could call it that), the symptoms of COVID-19 induced by BA.5 are largely mild, especially in vaccinated individuals.
you know, we reported the biden administration plans to offer updated boosters in september as we keep seeing the new variants. who should get that? the first people that should get the updated boosters are going to be people at high risk for severe disease. that s still the primary purpose of the vaccine, is to prevent severe disease. immunocompromised, eltderly people, those are the people that should be lining up on day one. whether or not it is beneficial to people in the lower risk group i think we need to wait and see. we know the updated boostersby crease neutralizing antibody of antibodies against ba.4, ba.5, but do they do it enough to prevent infection. that s an open question we have to see data. but generally people that are high risk, those are the individuals where boosters should be targeted. doctor, we just learned that polio has been detected in wastewater in new york city. we knew that a man in rockland county north of the city had tested positive for polio, but
to get it for only one dose, because people don t just come back for the second dose. let me ask you this. president biden s rebound covid diagnosis, he tested positive again on saturday , after taking paxlovid for the first bout of covid. he continues to test positive. can you explain to us why it is let me say this . most of the people i know in my personal life, impacts on it, got rebound from covid . i m in your life. aren t i? so did i. you got rebound covid from taking paxlovid? i had it s not really a rebound. that s what we can get into, more than just semantics. i believe that the paxlovid dosing, which was a treatment over five days, was probably adequate against the variant they tested during the trials, which was the delta variant. it s simply not adequate in many people s cases for this new ba-5. it s just not. ba-5 is able to evade both the