Health Canada told CBC News they’ll finish reviewing updated COVID vaccines by “early autumn” on the heels of the U.S. approving two updated vaccines to protect against hospitalizations and deaths.
As COVID looms over the Paralympic Games in Paris that start Wednesday following outbreaks among Olympic athletes, new subvariants of Omicron continue to ebb and flow and make people ill. Doctors and public health experts want people to consider getting immunized as part of their fall plans.
Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters on Aug. 22 why officials think the updated vaccines are important.
“While the COVID virus continues to mutate and change faster than the flu virus, our underlying immunity from prior vaccines and prior infections provides some protection,” Cohen said. “But we know that protection decreases over time, and certain groups continue to be at higher risk from COVID and other viruses, and we need to continue to protect ourselves and our loved ones.”
It is. But in addition flu’s transmission is affected significantly by air conditions and the speed with which it mutates. SARS-CoV-2 mutates faster and it transmits during the summer air conditions just as well as the winter. In effect we get COVID waves every time there’s a new variant that evades the immunity acquired from from the previous variant. That seems to happen every couple of months or so. Spending time indoors still makes things worse so the peaks are typically higher during the winter months. And of course the holiday season is a massive superspreader event.