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The Food and Drug Administration could authorize Pfizer's updated Covid boosters by the end of August, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said during an investor call Tuesday. The drugmaker asked the FDA in June to authorize an updated version of its Covid booster that is designed to target the XBB.1.5 subvariant, a coronavirus strain that began circulating widely last winter. Moderna made a similar request that same month. The requests came days after the FDA advised the drugmakers to update the shots to target XBB.1.5 ahead of a fall Covid booster campaign.

Is the pandemic kaput? Clearly, not for some. And if it isn’t over yet, when might it ever be? COVID-19 isn’t going away — it’s part of the planet now. Apropos of its endurance, there’s news at the University of Notre Dame. These days, we’ve gleaned a couple of facts concerning the COVID vaccine: It doesn’t prevent COVID infection. It doesn’t prevent COVID transmission. Hence, contrary to claims by plenty of politicians, the pricks do not protect “other people.” ... Yet, on Tuesday, Notre Dame’s University Health Services reportedly made an injection-requiring announcement. Per an email posted by post-graduate fellow...

The CDC recommends that everyone over 12 get an updated booster as long as at least two months have passed since their last Covid shot. At least 4.4 million people have received an updated Covid booster since the start of the month, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number represents around 1.5% of people currently eligible to receive the shots in the U.S. The data does not include people who received updated Pfizer-BioNTech boosters in Idaho and Texas, the CDC said, so it is likely an underestimate. The White House estimates the...

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Friday suggested that the definition of what constitutes being “fully vaccinated” may change as boosters become more commonplace, echoing a move handed down several weeks ago by Israeli officials. For now, in order to meet the CDC’s criteria for being “fully vaccinated,” one has to have two shots of either the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, or one dose of Johnson & Johnson’s. “We have not yet changed the definition of ‘fully vaccinated.’ We will continue to look at this. We may need to update our definition of...