Switzerland’s medicines regulatory agency Swissmedic announced on Monday that it has approved the country’s first bivalent vaccine against Covid-19, which can be used as a booster dose, Reuters writes.

The Spikevax vaccine, developed by the American company Moderna using messenger RNA technology against two variants of the new coronavirus, is approved for all people over the age of 18, representatives of Swissmedic said.

Swissmedic has granted a temporary approval for the use of this Moderna vaccine, adapted to protect against two different strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The new vaccine, called Spikevax Bivalent Original/Omicron, was designed to be administered in two doses of 0.5 ml each. Each dose contains 25 micrograms of the original Spikevax mRNA-1273 vaccine and 25 micrograms of messenger RNA targeting the Omicron variant (original BA1 subvariant and BA.4/BA.5 subvariants).

Swissmedic said on Monday that the vaccine generated higher concentrations of antibodies against the Omicron variant in clinical tests than the original Spikevax vaccine, and that the new bivalent serum had “comparable side effects” compared to the original serum. Side effects include irritation, redness or swelling at the injection site, fatigue, headache, chills, and nausea.

Representatives of the Committee of Experts on Human Medicine, in turn, allowed separate decisions to use the new bivalent vaccine produced by Moderna, Swissmedic reports, Agerpres reports.