New covid booster can update protection from severe disease, Western Pa. doctors say

Western Pennsylvania doctors say the newly approved covid booster vaccine will help protect from severe impacts of the most recent variants.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially approved updated covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer on Monday. The vaccines have been tweaked to correspond to the Omicron variant XBB.1.5, and replace the previous bivalent vaccine.

Once clinical guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is finalized, both Allegheny Health Network and UPMC anticipate the vaccine will become available within the next two weeks.

Covid cases in Allegheny County have been on the uptick since mid-June, according to county monitoring. From Aug. 27-Sept. 2, there were 502 positive tests in the county — 72 more than the previous week’s report. In the second week of June, the county had reported just 70 cases. While formal case counts don’t account for many positive cases that use home tests, they still can show general trends and spikes in illness.

While two additional spinoffs of the Omicron variant, BA.2.86 or “Pirola” and EG.5 or “Eris,” are now spreading in the U.S., the FDA notes the new vaccines “are expected to provide good protection against covid-19 from the currently circulating variants.”

“The new variants that are calculating have small changes, compared to the ones that were used to design this vaccine,” said Dr. Graham Snyder, medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at UPMC.

“The vaccine will still teach our immune system to recognize the variants that are currently circulating,” he said. “The variants that are currently circulating are a lot different from the very first variants, and they’re likely a lot different from the variants that we experienced when we were getting the prior vaccine.”

Snyder noted updating a covid vaccine is likely to be an addition to one’s annual to-do list, just like getting a flu shot.

“The virus has shown its ability to change over time, and there may be more than one strain of the virus circulating. This is familiar from influenza,” he said. “The idea is that each annual vaccine prepares our immune system to recognize the gradually or dramatically changing virus.”

Importance of vaccine

Keeping your vaccinations updated reminds your immune system how to fight off covid, similar to getting a flu shot, said Dr. Amy Crawford-Faucher, AHN Family Medicine family physician and vice chair of the Primary Care Institute. Patients will be able to get the flu and covid vaccine at the same time this fall, if they want.

“It’s important to continually reintroduce your body to this safe way of boosting your immunity,” she said. “The covid vaccine is a way to remind your system that this is something we are going to fight.”

Updating the vaccine helps keep up with evolving changes to the virus itself, Snyder explained.

“The idea is that the surface of the virus changes — it looks different to the immune system,” he said. “Over time, it can be that the immune system doesn’t recognize the virus very well, so everything that the immune system has done to prepare for the virus and respond, particularly by preparing antibodies that match well to the virus, that preparedness may be lost. By getting the updated vaccine, it tells the immune system that the virus looks like this and to prepare for the virus that is circulating.”

Dr. Carol Fox, chief medical officer at Independence Health System in Westmoreland, Butler and Clarion counties, said the system “strongly encourages” all members of the community to get their covid booster this fall.

“This booster has been designed to have specific activity toward recently circulating variants and is another tool in our chest to mitigate hospitalization and death from covid-19,” Fox said. “Everyone 5 years of age and older is eligible to receive this booster provided it has been at least 2 months since your last vaccine. Infants and children 6 months to 4 years of age are eligible for 1-3 doses depending on prior vaccination status and with guidance from your child’s physician.”

The health system is exploring options for how the booster vaccine will be distributed, according to a spokesperson.

While the covid vaccine does not prevent all infections from covid, it can help avoid serious disease, hospitalization and death, Snyder said. People who are sick with respiratory symptoms, especially if they have medical conditions that make them vulnerable to serious complications, should still test for covid and influenza, because treatments like Paxlovid may be available, he added.

“The primary job of these vaccines is to prevent you from being sick enough to land in the hospital, require intensive care, or even die,” he said. “It reduces that risk. It’s an added benefit that they also do a pretty good job of keeping you from getting sick.”

“It may not prevent you from getting covid, but it certainly will help prevent it from becoming serious covid,” said Crawford-Faucher.