(Reuters) – Current COVID-19 vaccines are not well-matched against the BA.2 version of Omicron, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday, as its panel of outside experts meets to discuss changes to future booster doses.

The FDA, however, said booster shots protect against serious outcomes of COVID-19, compared with the two preliminary doses.

U.S. health officials in late March authorized a second booster dose of Moderna and Pfizer’s vaccines for people aged 50 and older, citing data showing waning immunity and risks posed by the Omicron variant.

“This discussion today is a much larger discussion – it’s a discussion for what do we do about the entire population, and what do we do when we think the virus has evolved further,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

In a large study from Israel published on Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, a fourth dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine lowered rates of severe COVID-19, and to a lesser extent, rates of infection, among the elderly but the protection against infection appeared short-lived.

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