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Moderna’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Burton said on Sunday that his company was preparing to provide large amounts of its vaccine booster against omicron and other COVID-19 variants this fall. “We’re confident by the fall of this year we should have large amounts of that new booster vaccine that will protect against Omicron and other variants,” Burton said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Last month, Moderna announced that its new bivalent COVID-19 booster shot was more effective against all variants than the company’s currently available coronavirus vaccine. (Beals, 5/1)

Moderna Inc's chief medical officer said on Sunday the company's vaccine for children under 6 years old will be ready for review by a Food and Drug Administration panel when it meets in June. Moderna sought emergency use authorization from the FDA on Thursday. An advisory panel of experts to the U.S. drug regulator will meet in June to review the request. (Chiacu, 5/2)

Moderna's request for authorization of its COVID-19 vaccine in children under six years is amping up pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to act quickly on the shots. Thursday's request from the vaccine maker threw another wrinkle in the delicate regulatory dance over when kids under 5 can be vaccinated at a time when plenty of parents are expressing growing frustration with the wait. The FDA would prefer to evaluate data and simultaneously make decisions about how Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccines work on small children, to give parents more of a comparison, the New York Times writes. That could take as long as June. (Reed, 5/2)

A top Food and Drug Administration official pledged Friday not to delay the rollout of coronavirus vaccines for the youngest children and said at least one of the two shots under review could become available in June. The remarks by Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, came in an interview about the agency’s new, but tentative, timeline for handling vaccine issues during the next two months. The FDA announced plans to convene meetings with its outside advisers on June 8, 21 and 22 to consider emergency use authorizations for pediatric coronavirus shots and to hold additional sessions for other pressing vaccine matters. (McGinley and Johnson, 4/29)