The Guthrie County Health Services Department is preparing to roll out an omicron specific COVID-19 vaccine shot. 

Health Services Director Jotham Arber says that the new shot is a bivalent vaccine which he says is not a new term which means that this vaccine is formulated for a specific type of a virus. Arber tells Raccoon Valley Radio how this vaccine is made up. 

“And so with this bivalent we have both the original strain of COVID-19 as well as an alteration there for the new strains that were seeing the omicron specifically.” 

Arber says that they have received a lot of questions from the public about the studies associated with this new vaccine. He explains that with the original vaccine they did a lot of human studies but that was not the same with the bivalent vaccine. 

“With this vaccine, when the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approved it and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) signed off on it, they only did mice studies. And I’d say this. They generally speaking with vaccines like the flu shot, when we look at doing a year after year formulation, they just use the mice studies because all that they’re doing are small alterations to the formula. They’re not changing the ingredients in the formula except for the piece that needs to target the variants.”

Arber states that people must be two months past the completion of the two series COVID-19 vaccine to get this new bivalent vaccine. He notes that for the Monderna omicron specific vaccine a person must be 18 years or older and for the Pfizer it is 12 and older. He also adds that the Guthrie County Health Services Department has received the new vaccine and is close to being able to put it in arms.