2024-05-05 21:43:00
The EU medicines watchdog has called for Covid-19 vaccines to be updated before the next vaccination campaign to fight a new version of the virus that continues to claim thousands of lives.
JN.1 is now the most widespread variant in the world, and has overtaken the XBB family which is the target of the latest vaccines, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recalled in a press release.
The watchdog’s emergency task force, based in Amsterdam, said it had “recommended to update Covid-19 vaccines to target this new JN.1 version for the 2024 -2025 vaccination campaign”.
The latest epidemiological bulletin from the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded around 4,500 deaths from Covid in March and 275,000 new cases were reported worldwide.
Even if Covid-19 “is no longer a global health emergency, the virus continues to spread, transform and kill,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned in January.
The EMA has invited vaccine manufacturers with marketing authorization to contact it.
“Companies developing new Covid-19 vaccines that do not target JN.1 are also advised to contact (us) to discuss strategies to change the composition of their vaccines,” the EMA said.
In May 2023, Dr. Tedros ended Covid-19 as an international public health emergency, more than three years after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
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