Moderna Spikevax bivalent Covid-19 available on Oct 14

This article is more than 12 months old

Oct 11, 2022 02:12 pm

The roll-out of the bivalent version of Moderna's Spikevax vaccine is being brought forward by three days to Friday, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said on Tuesday.

This is because preparations for the vaccine's introduction were completed ahead of time, MOH said, allowing the shots to be made available before the scheduled date of Oct 17.

The ministry added that as infections are rising due to the emergence of another Omicron subvariant, XBB, giving shots of the new vaccine earlier would be beneficial.

This means that from Friday, those aged 50 and above, whose last Covid-19 vaccine jab was at least five months ago, can walk into any of the nine joint testing and vaccination centres offering the Moderna vaccine islandwide to get the bivalent shot, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung told members of the media on Tuesday.

The Moderna bivalent vaccine, which was approved by the Health Sciences Authority (HSA) in September, targets the original Sars-CoV-2 strain of the virus as well as the Omicron BA.1 variant.

Preliminary data showed that the Moderna bivalent vaccine is also effective against the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 variants, and others such as the Delta and Gamma variants, HSA said then.