Covid-19 vaccine rules may change from 2025: What you should know
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to make big changes to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations. On May 20, FDA officials said that in the future, annual COVID-19 booster shots for healthy people under 65 would be approved only if drug companies carry out detailed clinical trials.If implemented, the updated vaccines might be available to older adults only and people who are at high risk of getting seriously sick from COVID-19, according to Reuters.advertisementThe FDA also wants Pfizer and Moderna to add warnings to their vaccine labels to explain the small risk that males, aged 16 to 25, could develop heart inflammation after vaccination.
According to previous studies by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the new COVID-19 vaccines have reduced the risk of hospitalisation to around 33% in those with compromised immune systems. However, the benefits in healthy individuals are still not quite clear. Therefore, according to the FDA, more testing is required.FDA OFFICIALS SAY BOOSTERS MAY NOT BE NEEDED FOR ALLFDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and vaccine official Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that while the original development of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 was a huge achievement, it's not clear whether healthy people still need yearly boosters.advertisementThey explained that many countries have limited vaccine access to older adults or people with health problems. However, the US still lets nearly everyone over six months old get a shot."The US policy has sometimes been justified by arguing that the American people are not sophisticated enough to understand age-and-risk-based recommendations," they wrote. "We reject this view."Makary and Prasad proposed that the FDA would allow boosters without conducting full trials for adults above 65 and people with medical conditions like asthma, cancer, or cystic fibrosis."We simply don't know whether a healthy 52-year-old woman with a normal BMI who has had COVID-19 three times and has received six previous doses of a COVID-19 vaccine will benefit from the seventh dose,' the doctors wrote. 'This policy will compel much-needed evidence generation."PFIZER RESPONDS TO FDA'S PLANPfizer, one of the major vaccine makers, is still reviewing the FDA's proposal. "We stand by the science behind the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and continue to believe that broad vaccination programs are an essential tool for helping to prevent COVID-19-associated hospitalisations and severe disease, including death," Pfizer said in a statement to USA TODAY on May 22.Must Watch
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hindu
35 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Neymar tests COVID-19 positive — Santos confirms Brazil forward's illness
Brazil forward Neymar has tested COVID-19 positive and is currently undergoing treatment, his club Santos said in a statement on Saturday. 'With a viral condition that began on Thursday (June 5), Neymar Jr. underwent laboratory tests, after evaluation by the Medical Department of Santos FC, which confirmed infection by Covid-19,' the club said in a statement. 'The player had already been away from activities since Thursday, when he began showing symptoms, and remains resting at home and undergoing symptomatic treatment, as determined by a doctor.' Related Topics Neymar / Brazil / COVID-19
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
India records 4 fresh Covid fatalities; toll rises to 59
NEW DELHI: India recorded four fresh fatalities in Covid patients on Saturday, including that of a full-term pregnant woman from Madhya Pradesh. Govt update stated that the deceased woman suffered from seizures during delivery and later it was found that she was Covid positive. Maharashtra, which has recorded 17 deaths in Covid patients over the last few weeks - the highest for any state - reported one more death taking the toll in the state to 18. Kerala also reported a Covid death in a cancer patient, taking the state's toll to 12. The fourth death was recorded in Tamil Nadu. W ith this, the total number of deaths due to Covid this year has touched 59, while the active case tally has reached 5,755. In view of increase in cases and deaths, Centre is conducting mock drills to check facility-level preparedness for Covid. States have also been instructed to ensure availability of oxygen, isolation beds, ventilators and essential medicines in view of rising cases. Official sources have maintained that most cases are mild and managed under home care. To evaluate the current Covid situation and preparedness measures, a series of review meetings were held on June 2 and 3 under the chairpersonship of Dr Sunita Sharma, director general of health services, with representatives of Disaster Management Cell, Emergency Management Response Cell, National Centre for Disease Control, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), central govt hospitals in Delhi, and states and UTs. On June 4, official sources said that state and district surveillance units under IDSP are closely monitoring influenza-like illness (ILI) and severe acute respiratory illness (SARI). "Testing is recommended for all admitted SARI cases and 5% of ILI cases as per guidelines, and positive SARI samples are sent for whole genome sequencing through ICMR-VRDL network," an official source had said.
Time of India
3 hours ago
- Time of India
Trump is forcing us to confront the myth of the American dream itself
At the height of the Covid pandemic, a philosopher and an academic in the US began writing to each other discussing everything from careers to chronic pain. These letters have now taken the shape of 'The End Doesn't Happen All At Once: A Pandemic Memoir'. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now In a conversation with Shruti Sonal , Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, an English professor, and Chi Rainer Bornfree , who co-founded a school for activists, talk about the Covid years and the impact of Trump You've spoken about how writing about the pandemic — something people have been eager to forget — felt like looking directly into the sun. What drove you to publish this series of letters? R: This is a deeply lived-in book for me — one that allowed me to attend, in both an intimate and expansive way, to what it meant to be alive during a time of dramatic social, geopolitical, and technological upheaval. During the pandemic, we were all aware of tragedies unfolding on multiple scales, even as we experienced moments of joy, beauty, and connection in our own lives. How could we hold all of that complexity together? How might we stay with it, rather than turn away? We published this memoir as an offering to readers who might be moved by the way we valued our own and each other's lives, and who might find strength in what one reader described as our 'deep and curious' friendship. It's important to remember those years not only because they were marked by loss and devastation — much of which has not yet been adequately grieved — but also because they revealed new possibilities, moments of radical awakening, and potential solidarities. Covid and measles cases are rising, and vaccination rates are falling. Do you think any lessons have been learnt? C: There was learning — briefly — but after the initial shock, there was much more forgetting and active suppression of what we learned. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now With cases rising in the US of bird flu and measles, I hope that masking and other acts to care for public health will surface quickly from our societies' muscle-memory. But I worry that, like someone who persistently misspells a common word, too many Americans are clinging stubbornly to the wrong lessons from the pandemic: that we can't trust the experts, that it's 'us against them', or that 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Ragini, in one letter, you write about the dilemmas of being an Indian writing in English, a colonial bequest and the language of the elites. How do you see the current push for translated literature in India vis-a-vis the future of Indian writing in English? It's a very exciting time for Indian literature — from the global success of translated works like Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' to the growing practice of literary translation between Indian languages that no longer relies on English as a kind of neutral mediator, as was so often the case in the past. As an Indian American who writes in English and works primarily on the contemporary, I'm especially interested in the decentering — even provincialisation — of Indian diasporic writers, Anglo-American literatures, and Anglophone ambassadors for India in the West. In a very real sense, India no longer needs English (the language or its writers) to speak for it. At the same time, it would be foolish to deny that English is already an Indian language, with its own indigenous life. In my recent book on literary studies, 'Overdetermined', I examine how Indian English writing is made 'American', so to speak, through its circulation in ethnic and postcolonial literature classrooms. In one chapter, I argue that the challenge now is to be careful not to allow demotic, so-called 'vernacular' English texts to stand in for — or crowd out — the urgent need to read and publish works in translation. As an academic in the US, how do you see the Trump administration's assault on universities? Is this the beginning of the end of the great American dream for many immigrant students? R: In many ways, the violence the Trump administration has inflicted on US higher education is only accelerating a trend that's been underway since the turn of the century: immigrant students, especially from India and China, choosing to return 'home' because the future — politically, economically, and intellectually — is increasingly centered in a rising Asia, in a post-American world. But yes, in another sense, it does feel like the beginning of the end of the American dream for many immigrant students. My parents came to the US for college and graduate school in the early 1980s, and it's hard to imagine their particular trajectories being possible today. If there's a silver lining, perhaps it's that we're being forced to confront the myth of the American dream itself — recognising that it was never universally accessible, and that many have experienced it as a nightmare. As an academic, I still hope we can preserve what's best about our universities: as spaces of meaningful knowledge production and critical inquiry, and as institutions committed to broad-based access and opportunity. Chi, you run The Activist Graduate School (AGS). What role is it playing as students in the US get arrested and deported for their activism? AGS is an experimental set of courses on activism that my partner Micah Bornfree and I started because we saw that movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter had achieved huge mobilisation very quickly, but failed to realise enduring material transformations. We wanted to enable activists on and off campus to break with groupthink and tired modes of protest, and innovate new methods of seizing power. Ragini and I both went to the University of California, Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s which paved the way for much student activism today. Those rights are now being eroded.
