02/02/2024

The New COVID-19 Shot is Surprisingly Effective Against the Latest Variant

It is about 54 percent effective at protecting people from the virus' symptoms

The latest COVID-19 vaccine offers good protection against the currently dominant strain of the virus, according to a new report in the MMWR, a journal published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It's the first effectiveness data for the updated vaccine, which was released last fall.

Using federal and pharmacy-reported data sets, the team of CDC scientists compared people's COVID-19 test results to their self-reported vaccination status collected from September 2023 to mid-January 2024. They found that the new vaccine was about 54 percent effective at protecting people from symptoms of COVID-19. In other words, the symptoms that prompted people to get tested were less likely to be due to COVID-19 and more likely to be something else among those who were vaccinated a week to four months before getting tested.

They further calculated that the vaccine was 49 percent effective at protecting against symptoms from the JN.1 variant, which now causes a majority of infections in the U.S.—even though the shot was designed to target a different version of the virus, the XBB.1.5 variant.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.