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The EU’s medicines watchdog has called for Covid-19 vaccines to be updated before the next vaccination campaign to combat a new variant of the virus which continues to claim thousands of lives .
The most widespread variant in the world is now JN.1, and it has overtaken the XBB family which is the target of the most recent vaccines, recalled the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in a press release.
The watchdog’s emergency task force, based in Amsterdam, said it had “recommended updating Covid-19 vaccines to target this new JN.1 variant for the 2024 vaccination campaign -2025”.
The latest epidemiological bulletin from the World Health Organization (WHO) recorded some 4,500 deaths due to Covid in March and 275,000 new cases reported worldwide.
Even if Covid-19 “is no longer a global health emergency, the virus continues to circulate, 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 currently developing new Covid-19 vaccines not targeting JN.1 are also encouraged to contact (us) to discuss strategies for changing the composition of their vaccines,” the EMA said.
In May 2023, Dr. Tedros declared the end of Covid-19 as an international public health emergency, more than three years after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
