Europe 1 with AFP 6:39 p.m., September 02, 2022

The European Medicines Agency said on Friday that new variants of Covid-19 could emerge this winter.

The European regulator has assured that existing vaccines should protect populations against serious forms of the disease, while the EU will launch a recall campaign.

New variants of the coronavirus could appear this winter but existing vaccines should protect people against severe forms of the disease, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday.

The European regulator was holding a regular press conference on the Covid-19 situation as the European Union prepares to launch a recall campaign ahead of a feared wave of new cases by the end of the year.

The recall campaign with the new vaccines

The booster campaign will be with suitable vaccines - approved by the EMA on Thursday - targeting the now-dominant Omicron variant, and the original vaccines developed to fight the first strain of the virus that first appeared in China in 2019, said EMA, based in Amsterdam.

But people "shouldn't wait for a specific vaccine," said EMA's head of vaccine strategy Marco Cavaleri.

“There could be a whole new variant emerging that we are not able to predict today,” he added.

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The EMA on Thursday approved adapted vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna targeting the Omicron BA.1 subvariant in addition to the original strain.

A new Pfizer vaccine targeting the contagious BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of the Omicron variant, which have emerged in recent months as the dominant strains in the world, should be authorized in mid-September.

A similar vaccine from Moderna is also in the works.

Priority vaccines for vulnerable people

These vaccines adapted to Omicron will largely be reserved for vulnerable people such as the elderly, pregnant women and workers in the health sector, underlined Marco Cavaleri.

Most people will receive the original vaccines, "still capable of protecting against the severe form of Covid-19 and death", even if they are less effective in preventing contamination, he explained.

Furthermore, it is "not excluded" that new variants will emerge this winter that are closer to the previous sub-variants of Omicron, currently largely overtaken by the BA.4 and 5 lineages.