The COVID-19 booster market is starting to look more like an annual flu season than it did in the first two years of the pandemic. That’s according to Moderna (MRNA) CEO Stéphane Bancel, who joined Yahoo Finance’s 2022 All Markets Summit to discuss the COVID vaccine outlook. Bancel noted that not everyone is likely to need an annual booster.
“I think it’s going to be like the flu. If you’re a 25-year-old do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy? You might want to … but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high risk, people above 50 years of age, people with co-morbidities,” Bancel said. That isn’t the 8 billion global population potential market of the pandemic, but it is still 1.5 billion people that fall into those categories, Bancel said.
“It’s a lot of people that are going to need an annual booster. And people that are younger are going to need to decide what to do,” he said, noting that he has chosen to get an annual flu shot for years. While many health experts have been worried about the low uptake in boosters and what it could mean for the coming winter variants, others have echoed Bancel’s comments, including Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. Paul Offit, who recently told Yahoo Finance that boosters are most important for high-risk groups.