The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s advisory panel is set to meet and vote on Thursday regarding the composition of COVID-19 vaccines for the 2026-2027 immunization campaign. The main question is whether these vaccines should target the dominant XFG variant, despite concerns raised about the limited data on currently circulating strains.
Vaccine Policy and Data Challenges
The FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which remains unchanged in its membership under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will convene to address this issue. This meeting follows a period of uncertainty in vaccine regulation, which began when a court stayed decisions made by the CDC’s advisory panel to drop recommendations for childhood vaccines, including the COVID shot, due to improper appointments by Kennedy.
According to briefing documents released ahead of the meeting, the FDA noted that assessing the evolution of COVID-19 has become increasingly challenging. This difficulty is attributed to a decline in virologic surveillance, sequencing volumes, and timely data sharing from state and local public health departments. The CDC’s COVID dashboard highlights this gap, as weekly data is currently unavailable due to low sequencing submissions. The most recent update, now a month old, indicated that XFG strains accounted for more than half of U.S. cases over the four weeks ending April 11.
Impact on Vaccine Development
The reduction in sequencing reflects both the loss of government surveillance staff and decreased academic funding, according to Jill Roberts, an associate professor at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. For the 2025-26 season, the FDA had recommended that COVID shots target the LP.8.1 subvariant of the JN.1 strain. However, other subvariants such as NB.1.8.1 have emerged since May last year, as noted in the FDA’s briefing documents.
Earlier this month, the World Health Organization recommended that vaccine manufacturers target the monovalent LP.8.1 strain or other currently circulating variants such as XFG or NB.1.8.1. Currently, four COVID shots are approved for use in the U.S.: Moderna’s mNEXSPIKE and Spikevax, Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty, and Novavax-Sanofi’s protein-based shot, which takes longer to manufacture.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
