What you need to know about Moderna’s new COVID vaccine, just approved by the FDA

Moderna, over the weekend, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved its second-generation COVID vaccine, but only for specific populations: all adults 65 and over and those between 12 and 64 with at least one underlying risk factor as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Moderna’s COVID shot had previously been approved for everyone 12 and older.

The narrower approval follows the FDA announcing it was likely to limit access to immunizations among healthy children and adults under 65 this fall—as well as an announcement by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy (who, in 2021, called mRNA shots the “deadliest vaccine ever made”) about how COVID shots would be removed from the federal vaccine schedule for children and pregnant women. Still, days la