Pfizer and BioNTech say data show COVID vaccine has more than 70% efficacy in

Sequencing of the cases confirmed that most were caused by omicron BA.2, suggesting broader protection across variants.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccine for very young children on June 17, and it’s currently under review by the European regulator.

“While these results confirm that three 3 [milligram] doses of our COVID-19 vaccine provide young children with a high level of protection at a time when the Omicron BA.2 strain was highly prevalent with a favorable safety profile, we are also developing an Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent vaccine in this age group to address these sublineages,” said Uğur Şahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech. 

The news comes a day after Pfizer and BioNTech said they had formally completed an application asking the Food and Drug Administration to authorize their experimental bivalent COVID-19 booster for those who are 12 years old or older.

The new shot equally targets the original strain of the virus and the BA.4 and BA.5 strains, the latter of which is now the dominant strain of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in the U.S.

The news comes as U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

Cases are rising in Georgia, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri and Maine. They are falling in all other states.

The daily average for new cases stood at 92,602 on Monday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 16% from two weeks ago to the lowest level seen since mid-May. The daily average for hospitalizations was down 8% at 39,963, while the daily average for deaths is down 5% to 459.

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Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• A study conducted by the University of Peking and Tsinghua University in Beijing has found that incubation period for COVID has been shrinking with each new variant. The study was published in the journal JAMA Network Open on Monday. Researchers analyzed data from 141 studies to find that the incubation period declined from an average five days with the alpha strain to 3.43 days with omicron, which is now dominant across the world. “The findings of this study suggest that SARS-CoV-2 has evolved and mutated continuously throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, producing variants with different enhanced transmission and virulence.,” the authors wrote. “Identifying the incubation period…