When Health Canada on Tuesday approved Moderna’s updated Spikevax vaccine – designed to target Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 – health officials avoided labelling the latest shot a ‘booster’ during a technical briefing. Here’s why they say they’re dropping the word.
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When Health Canada on Tuesday approved Moderna’s updated Spikevax vaccine – designed to target Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 – Canadian health officials also avoided calling the latest shot a booster during a technical briefing later that day.
Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, likened the new language around updated vaccines to the same language public health agencies use when referring to the flu shot each year.
Dr. Supriya Sharma, chief medical adviser with Health Canada, added that the language shift came about from a series of conversations with regulators about creating standardized, international terminology for the vaccines.
As part of that conversation, she said, Health Canada and other regulators also decided to stop referring to “primary series” doses – the initial COVID-19 vaccine doses a previously unvaccinated person receives.
Dr. Matthew Tunis, executive secretary to the National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), explained during the technical briefing Tuesday that the new phrasing also falls in line with how drug manufacturers are talking about the vaccines in their own official monographs.
Tunis and Sharma both agreed it isn’t wrong or inaccurate to continue call the seasonal jabs “boosters,” since they boost the body’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2, but said the official language is nonetheless evolving.
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