United States, 2026-2027 Covid vaccines approved: CDC recommendations still pending

On August 28, 2026, the Food and Drug Administration approved the Covid vaccines for the 2026-2027 season produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Novavax-Sanofi. These are monovalent formulations, chosen to match the strains expected to circulate in the Northern Hemisphere’s autumn and winter. Arrival in pharmacies, clinics and hospitals is expected during September.

Alongside the regulator’s decision, however, there is a step that, as of this article’s publication date, is still missing: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not issued usage recommendations for the 2026-2027 Covid vaccines. Approval and recommendation are two distinct acts and come from two distinct institutions; the first has taken place, while there is no trace of the second in the documentation available to us.

What this gap concretely entails — for those distributing the doses, for those administering them, for those obtaining them — cannot be inferred from the available material, and this newspaper does not reconstruct it through conjecture. Likewise, we report no indication here as to who should or should not receive a dose: in the absence of a recommendation published by the CDC, there is no position from the U.S. health authority to attribute, and Redazione Zero does not formulate one of its own under any circumstances.

It is also worth noting what the regulator’s approval does not, in itself, say. The fact that a formulation has been authorized for the coming season does not equate to clinical efficacy data on the ground regarding the expected strains: the experimental data underlying the decision do not appear in the source available to us, and we are therefore unable to describe sample size, design or results. Anyone wishing to evaluate them will have to await the regulator’s documentation.

A methodological note is owed to the reader. This news currently comes from a single source (the U.S. outlet TODAY); no independent confirmation is available to the newsroom at the time of this edition’s closing. For a regulatory decision, our editorial standards require a primary or institutional source to be counted, and here one is lacking: we have not been able to directly consult the Food and Drug Administration’s act nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pages. We publish while disclosing this, as required by rule 2, and within a scope restricted solely to the elements reported by the source. The absence of CDC recommendations is itself negative information, meaning the observation that at present no document appears to exist: should one emerge with an earlier date, we will issue a correction with a visible note in this article and a mention in the following editorial.

Two verifiable elements remain to be watched in the coming weeks: the actual appearance of the doses in U.S. distribution channels by September, and the publication — or non-publication — of a recommendation document by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both can be checked on institutional websites, without need for intermediaries.

Sources: TODAY (U.S. news outlet) — only source available.