Drug Makers Gear Up For 2023-2024 COVID-19 Season With Subvariant Vaccines

Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Novavax Work With Regulators

 
• By Alaric DeArment
  
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The companies are all preparing to make available vaccines targeted to Omicron XBB subvariants, with the expectation that demand in the US will be about 50 million to 100 million doses.

Drug makers are preparing for the 2023-2024 COVID-19 season • Source: Shutterstock

The World Health Organization declared an end to COVID-19 as a public health emergency in May, but it warned at the time that the virus was still causing deaths and still mutating, and the emergence of the latest subvariants of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has triggered new vaccine activity. The major producers of COVID-19 vaccines – Pfizer Inc./BioNTech SE, Moderna, Inc. and Novavax, Inc. – are gearing up to make their vaccines against the new subvariants available by the fall, after a long trend of falling vaccine sales.

The latest is Novavax, which said on 22 August that its 2023-2024 season COVID vaccine induced neutralizing responses to emerging...

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