The first booster vaccines, targeting the Omicron variant of Covid-19, have been authorised by regulators across the world solely using data from animal testing
Commonly regulators would require human clinical trials before approval, however manufacturers Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech supplied data from testing on mice which have been accepted for emergency use authorisation by the European Medicines Agency, the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK’s MHRA
Science reported that at a meeting with the FDA, Pfizer showed that compared with the mice that received the original vaccine as a booster, the animals showed an increased response to all Omicron variants tested.
