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The Food and Drug Administration plans to greenlight updated versions of the Covid boosters as early as Friday, according to four people familiar with the agency’s plans. The latest shots are designed to target the XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant. Though that strain is no longer dominant, the boosters should still protect against current circulating subvariants, which are closely related, the drugmakers and experts say. (Lovelace Jr. and Alba, 9/6)

Pfizer on Wednesday said the updated Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine expected to be used this fall elicited a strong antibody response against the highly mutated BA.2.86 subvariant of the coronavirus in a preclinical study in mice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has previously indicated that BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who previously had COVID or were vaccinated with previous shots. (9/6)

At a briefing on global health issues today, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said there are concerning trends ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter, including rising deaths in parts of the Middle East and Asia and increased hospitalizations in multiple regions. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, included the caveat that data are limited, with few countries reporting information. Regarding variants, he said there is currently no dominant one, though EG.5 is on the rise. He said the heavily mutated BA.2.86 variant has been detected in small numbers in only 11 countries, though the WHO continues to monitor developments, especially regarding transmissibility and potential impact. (Schnirring, 9/6)

President Joe Biden tested negative for COVID-19 on Wednesday morning and is not experiencing any symptoms, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. The president, who is due to leave Thursday for a G-20 summit in India, is getting tested more often after first lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID on Monday. (Reklaitis, 9/6)

For two days straight, the White House told anyone who would listen that President Joe Biden was taking his Covid exposure seriously by following a strict set of public health precautions. Then Biden strode into a room full of people on Wednesday and reduced those precautions to a punchline. “I’ve been tested again today, I’m clear across the board,” Biden said, smiling as he held up his face mask. “They keep telling me, because it has to be 10 days or something, I gotta keep wearing it. But don’t tell them I didn’t have it when I walked in.” (Cancryn, 9/6)

School administrators say they are not eager to relive the bitter fights over masks and vaccination that dominated the first two years of the pandemic. Josh Tovar, a high school principal in Texas’s Garland Independent School District, said his campus is seeing a spike in student and staff infections that is depriving some classes of teachers. But, Tovar said, he would never consider requiring masks again, even if he had that power. (Natanson, Nirappil and Vazquez, 9/6)

Researchers in Sweden report that the risk of getting long COVID after a COVID-19 infection was higher for the wild type, Alpha, and Delta variants compared to Omicron. The study is published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Though prior research has shown that severe COVID-19 is less likely from Omicron infections compared to earlier variants, less is known about how each variant increases the likelihood of developing long COVID, or persistent symptoms lasting 12 or more weeks following acute infections. (Soucheray, 9/6)

During the first two years of the pandemic, from March 2020 to March 2022, there were approximately 90,000 more deaths in the United States attributed to cardiovascular disease than were expected for that span of time. The majority of these occurred in people 65 and older — the age group with the highest risk for cardiovascular complications. But heart-related deaths also increased dramatically in younger adults. In fact, a study found that the sharpest rise in deaths from heart attack during that period occurred in 25- to 44-year-olds. (Smith, 9/7)