Moderna’s bivalent jab boosts infections

After no doubt contemplating long and hard for minutes if not seconds, Japan’s panel of experts decided to choose Moderna’s and Pfizer’s barely tested Wuhan/BA.1 bivalent vaccines rather than their untested Wuhan/BA.4/5 ones to jab the public with from October.

The unjabbed will have to settle for the original shots though. Makes lots of sense. But why did Japan choose the Wuhan/BA.1 jab?

While drugmakers are going ahead with development of vaccines based on the BA.5 subtype, it will require more time before supplies are available, leading the government to opt instead for the BA.1-derived shots.

So Japan will take the quickest thing it can get its hands on. Well it’s nice to know Moderna and Pfizer will have somewhere to offload their stockpiles of Wuhan/BA.1 shots. So is there any evidence the new gene juice is actually going to stop the spread this time?

The bivalent vaccine, so named for its combination of ingredients deriving from existing COVID-19 shots and from the Omicron variant's BA.1 subtype, has been reported to provide some increase in neutralizing antibodies against the BA.5 subtype currently prevalent across the country.

Antibodies! The companies ran small trials and compared antibody responses of people who got yet another shot of the original gene juice and people got the updated one.

So have the new Moderna and Pfizer jabs shown any real-world effectiveness against infection? Well you could say Moderna’s has (mRNA-1273.214 is the bivalent jab; mRNA-1273 is the original).

In participants with no prior evidence of SARS-SoV-2 infection, starting 14 days after vaccination, SARS-CoV-2 infections, regardless of the presence of symptoms, occurred in 11 (3.2%) and 5 (1.9%) participants in the mRNA-1273.214 and mRNA-1273 groups, respectively. Of those 6 (1.8%) and 4 (1.5%) infections were asymptomatic, and there were 5 (1.5%) and 1 (0.4%) Covid-19 events (symptomatic infections) in the mRNA-1273.214 and mRNA-1273 groups, respectively. There were no emergency room visits or hospitalizations due to Covid-19.

So the Moderna fans who got the updated gene juice had higher rates infection (3.2% vs 1.9%) and symptomatic Covid (1.5% vs 0.4%) than those who got the old juice.

I didn’t think the jabs could get any worse. Looks like I was wrong. But I guess that explains why the companies and so-called regulators focus on antibodies now.

Winter should be interesting.