As guidelines around the COVID-19 pandemic continue to change and evolve, you may have recently heard of the bivalent vaccine and wondered what it is. In simplest terms, it’s an updated booster shot that was granted Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA on August 31, and developed to help protect against Omicron sub variants BA.4 and BA. 5, which are currently the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States.
“This approach to updating a vaccine to better fight the current strain of virus is the same general strategy that has been used for years and years with the flu,” said Grant Paulsen, MD and a pediatrician who oversees COVID vaccine clinical trials for kids ages 6 months to 11 years old at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
So, with clinics and major pharmacies across the country now offering vaccination appointments for the updated booster, we asked doctors how these shots work and what they recommend to parents who are on the fence about getting one for their child.
What is the difference between a bivalent vaccine and monovalent vaccine?
If we’re going to discuss vaccines, we have to break down the language, and that begins with bivalent versus monovalent. At their core both vaccines are intended to protect against COVID-19, but the difference lies in when they were developed.
“Bivalent shots are not given as part of the initial vaccination,” said Dr. Soumi Eachempati, co-founder and CEO of CLEARED4 and former professor of surgery and public health at Weill Cornell Medical College. “A bivalent booster is a new type of booster where the shot gives protection to the original COVID-19 strain and also some specific protection to the Omicron strain.”
The monovalent vaccine was created to target the original strain of COVID and is currently only approved for the initial series for someone that has not already been vaccinated. Monovalent COVID vaccines, either Pfizer or Moderna, are the ones that were first developed and the vaccine that you would have gotten as a primary COVID vaccine series.