It is standard practice with influenza to update the stains. 0 reason to think that updating the mRNA for COVID vaccines from one strain to another is dangerous. None. Zap. Zero. Zilch.
with lots of money and research going into the technology, I don't understand where folks are coming from.
Vaccines for influenza have been around for decades. The first covid shot was the first ever mRNA technology ever approved for human use.
Now the booster doesn’t simply swap out strains. It moves from a monovalent to a bivalent (original formula plus the Omicron Ba4/Ba5 formula) and we shouldn’t test it? The first ever bivalent mRNA vaccine. Deployed to everyone on the planet. With absolutely no human testing done.
If you’re okay with it, that’s great… that’s your personal choice to trust corrupt health authorities and for-profit vaccine manufacturers. Let me know how it goes.
The FDA instructed Pfizer and moderna to reformulate based on the changing variant landscape as ba.4/5 overtook ba.1
The ba.4/5 bivalent vaccine was an extremely incremental change from the ba.1 booster
A questionable one. Depending on the year, getting the influenza shot has been shown to give you negative efficacy. How nice would that be if we saw a -50% efficacy this year, wouldn't that be problematic for our strapped healthcare systems.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2017/02/studies-...
> In the 2014-15 season (when, as mentioned, the vaccine was unchanged from the year before and a drifted H3N2 strain was circulating), "negative effects of prior vaccination were pronounced and statistically significant," the researchers found. VE in those who received only the 2014-15 vaccine was estimated at 65% (95% CI, 25% to 83%), whereas VE for patients vaccinated two seasons in a row was -33% (95% CI, –78% to 1%).
It's good to ask questions but you should probably ask them of someone who knows what they are talking about instead of spreading conspiracies.