U.S. to buy 66M doses of Moderna's bivalent Omicron-adapted booster shots for $1.74B
Maddie Meyer

The U.S. government will buy 66M doses of Moderna's (NASDAQ:MRNA) bivalent COVID-19 vaccine for up to $1.74B, in a move to beef up supplies of the upgraded booster shot ahead of the fall and winter season.
The government is reportedly mulling plans to launch a COVID booster campaign with the Omicron-adapted vaccines in September. The retooled shots are expected to protect against the BA.5 subvariant of Omicron which is currently the dominant form of the virus in the U.S.
Moderna (MRNA) stock gained 3.2% to $163.06 in premarket trading on the news.
The contract includes options for the government to buy up to another 234M doses of the vaccine, Moderna (MRNA) said in a statement on Friday.
MRNA's bivalent booster candidate is called mRNA-1273.222. It contains the company's original COVID shot Spikevax plus the Omicron BA.4/5 strain mRNA.
The Biden administration's latest contract with Moderna (MRNA) comes after striking a $3.2B deal late last month with Pfizer (PFE) and its German-partner BioNTech (BNTX) for 105M doses of their COVID vaccine, including an Omicron-adapted version.