WASHINGTON - Currently spreading Covid-19 variants such as EG.5, or Eris, do not represent a major shift and updated vaccines in September will offer protection, the director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday.

“Right now, what we’re seeing with the changes in the viruses, they’re still susceptible to our vaccine, they’re still susceptible to our medicines, they’re still picked up by the tests,” CDC director Mandy Cohen said, in an interview on former Biden administration adviser Andy Slavitt’s “In the Bubble” podcast.

“We’re seeing small changes that are what I would call subtypes of what we’ve seen before.”

Updated vaccines should be available by mid- to late September, she said.

Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers have created new versions of their vaccine, which were updated to target the so-called XBB.1.5 subvariant that was dominant earlier this year in order to more closely resemble the circulating virus.

“We anticipate that they are going to be available for most folks by the third or fourth week of September,” Dr Cohen said.

The vaccines still need to be authorised by the US Food and Drug Administration and the CDC needs to make its recommendations, she said.

“We are likely to see this as a recommendation as an annual Covid shot just like we have an annual flu shot,” she said.

Pfizer/BioNTech SE, Moderna and Novavax have all said they expect to have supplies of the updated vaccine ready for roll-out this autumn.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation classified the EG.5 coronavirus strain, circulating in the United States and China, as a “variant of interest” but said it did not seem to pose more of a threat to public health than other variants.

Eris is the fasting-growing Covid-19 subvariant in the US, estimated to be responsible for around 17 per cent of current Covid-19 cases, according to the CDC. REUTERS