Moderna expects to distribute its bivalent booster vaccine candidate by August and has already produced the doses as it awaits approval.
"We've been producing millions of doses over the last couple of months," Moderna's president, Stephen Hoge, MD, told the Financial Times. "We would hope to have tens of millions to hundreds of millions of doses available in August, September and October to support boosting prior to the fall respiratory virus season."
The candidate boosted antibodies "5.4-fold above baseline" against omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 among the phase 2/3 trial's 800 participants, according to a June 22 press release. Moderna said it has "already shared these data" with regulators and, if authorized by the CDC and FDA, expects rollout to be this fall.
The subvariants accounted for almost 35 percent of COVID-19 cases as of June 18, according to CDC data. The week earlier, they caused 21.6 percent of cases.