What you need to know about the new Covid-19 vaccine

On Thursday, a new Covid-19 vaccine was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and Americans should be able to access the new shots in the next few days.

The vaccines come amid one of the worst Covid waves of the last two years. And while dangerous outcomes like hospitalization and death are nowhere near what they were at the height of the pandemic, both are still a risk, especially for older people and those with other risk factors like asthma or obesity.

This updated version of the vaccine does not target the now-dominant KP.3.1.1 strain, and instead focuses on that variant’s immediate predecessors, including a strain known as KP.2. That strain was more prevalent when work began on the new formulation; long development times make it difficult for drug makers to pivot to target each new variant.

“Evolution doesn’t stop and let us catch up,” Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Vox. “Evolution is always moving, and there’s some unpredictability of where the virus may go.”

Still, scientists believe the new drug will provide the public with at least some increased measure of protection against severe sickness, including against the latest variants. And it could offer some protection against infection since it targets the close relatives of the current dominant variant.

As of now, two new vaccines have been approved: one from Pfizer/BioNTech and one from Moderna. An update from Novavax is still awaiting approval.

Doses should be available within the week at doctors’ offices, as well as CVS and Walgreens pharmacies throughout the country; Walgreens will start offering appointments on September 6. However, the government is no longer buying and distributing the vaccine, so it’s no longer available for free. Insurance carriers should cover most, if not all, of the cost of vaccination, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has an overview of what costs those paying out of pocket might expect.

The CDC recommends that everyone age 6 months and up get one dose of the new vaccine, regardless of their previous vaccination status, and has stressed the importance of high-risk individuals keeping up with the latest vaccines. Other countries like Canada and the UK recommend that only those with high risk of hospitalization, serious illness, or death from the virus get inoculated.

Adalja said high-risk individuals should heed the CDC’s advice: “I’ve always been someone who wanted to make sure that the high-risk population really understood that these vaccines were going to disproportionately benefit them,” he told Vox.

The more high-risk factors you have — like advanced age, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, having a compromised immune system, pregnancy, asthma, and having never been vaccinated or had Covid — the more important it is to get two doses. “All of those types of people, they clearly should be the ones that are running to get this vaccine,” Adalja said.

Though high-risk people should have first priority for the updated vaccines, that doesn’t mean that healthy people with none of those risk factors won’t benefit from getting vaccinated; if you want to avoid infection, this version is likely going to be better at preventing transmission than previous versions have been. However, even with the updated vaccine, it’s a good idea to take other precautions, like masking in public places.

Covid-19 is now endemic — part of our everyday lives like the flu and cold viruses are. And it will keep evolving to evade the body’s defenses, necessitating new vaccine formulations. That means more new vaccine formulations are on the way, and that once they are approved, vaccination will still be the best way to protect yourself from the worst possible outcomes.

Update, August 23, 4 pm ET: This piece, originally published earlier on August 23, has been updated to clarify the CDC’s current recommendations about who should receive new vaccines.