New COVID Vaccines Will Be Ready This Fall. America Won’t Be.

New COVID Vaccines Will Be Ready This Fall. America Won’t Be. Respiratory-virus season starts soon, and our autumn vaccine strategy is shaky at best. Katherine J. Wu The Atlantic

Not so long ago, America’s next COVID fall looked almost tidy. Sure, cases might rise as the weather chills and dries, and people flock indoors. But Pfizer and Moderna were already cooking up America’s very first retooled COVID vaccines, better matched to Omicron and its offshoots, and a new inoculation campaign was brewing. Instead of needing to dose up three, four, even five times within short order, perhaps Americans could get just one COVID shot each year, matched roughly to the season’s circulating strains. Fall 2022 seemed “the first opportunity to routinize COVID vaccines,” says Nirav Shah, the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and simultaneously recharge the country’s waning enthusiasm for shots...