Covid is stil killing people…
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For the first time since the COVID vaccines became available in pharmacies in 2021, the average person in the U.S. can’t count on getting a free annual shot against a disease that has been the main or a contributing cause of death for more than 1.2 million people around the country, including nearly 12,000 to date this year.
“COVID’s not done with us,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University. “We have to keep using the tools that we have. It’s not like we get to forget about COVID.”
In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services, led by prominent antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has announced a barrage of measures that are likely to reduce COVID vaccine access, leading to a swirl of confusion about what will be available for the 2025–2026 season. HHS officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Government officials appear to be limiting COVID shots to people who are aged 65 and older and to those who have certain preexisting health conditions—groups that have long been known to face a higher risk of developing severe COVID. Pregnant people and some children, meanwhile, appear to be explicitly excluded from access, despite plentiful evidence that vaccines are very safe and effective for them and that COVID infections can cause them significant harm.
Scientific American spoke with clinicians and public health experts about the latest COVID vaccine recommendations, what access may look like this fall, and how these policies might influence people’s vaccination choices and health.
What COVID vaccines will be manufactured this year?
Public health experts are monitoring a strain of the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 called NB.1.8.1, which was first detected early this year and last month became responsible for one in 10 COVID cases globally. So far, the new variant has mostly been reported in Asia and Europe. But it has also been picked up in airport surveillance in multiple U.S. states, says Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
The emergence of a new variant isn’t surprising, particularly at this time of year, Chin-Hong says. “It’s kind of acting like clockwork—maybe this might be the variant of the summer,” he adds. Still, NB.1.8.1 has led to concerns about a potential surge in cases, although Chin-Hong and other scientists don’t have any evidence so far that it causes more serious disease than other currently circulating strains.
“All of these new variants, they might be more transmissible, they might be more immune evasive, but I’ve seen no data whatsoever that suggests that they’re more pathogenic,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.
Within the U.S., a strain called LP.8.1 has been the most common one detected since March. Both NB.1.8.1 and LP.8.1 are among the alphabet soup of strains that descended from a key ancestor lineage called Omicron JN.1, which dominated U.S. cases by early 2024.
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