The FDA's advisory committee VRBPAC has voted 19-2 to update the coronavirus vaccine strain to include Omicron-specific strains.

Based on the discussions at the meeting, Pfizer and Moderna expect to have the updated vaccines broadly available by October in time for the winter.

No decision yet on whether it will be a monovalent or bivalent vaccine. At present, Moderna has a bivalent vaccine using Omicron and the original Wuhan strain, and Pfizer has a monovalent vaccine using Omicron. Both companies presented somewhat competing data on that front. Pfizer's monovalent vaccine data showed higher efficacy than its bivalent data, but Moderna's bivalent vaccine appeared to have longer duration of protection than its monovalent data. So there might be a subtle trade-off between a monovalent versus a bivalent vaccine.

And no decision yet on which Omicron strain will be used. The companies developed vaccines for the original Omicron variant BA.1, but now BA.4 and BA.5 are becoming predominant. Pfizer did have some animal study data showing BA.4 and BA.5 specific vaccines had higher antibody levels.

The FDA's final decision on this should come in early July.

This would all be much harder without this vaccine technology. Consider that we usually do this strain updating for Flu in March for next year's season. Here we are able to do it several months later.

Hard to predict here with the mutation of the coronavirus at present, but in the future this will be really valuable.