The Food and Drug Administration on Friday recommended shortening the waiting time for COVID-19 booster shots for those who received the Moderna vaccine.

The FDA announced it has amended its emergency use authorization to cut the interval down to five months following the second Moderna shot in the primary two-dose series. Currently, people are required to wait six months.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must sign off on the change before it would take effect. The FDA and CDC made a similar change for a booster shot following the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine earlier this week. 

People who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are eligible for a booster two months later. Federal regulators allow all adults to receive a different brand of booster shot than what they initially received.

“The country is in the middle of a wave of the highly contagious omicron variant, which spreads more rapidly than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and other variants that have emerged,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “Vaccination is our best defense against COVID-19, including the circulating variants, and shortening the length of time between completion of a primary series and a booster dose may help reduce waning immunity. Today’s action also brings consistency in the timing for administration of a booster dose among the available mRNA vaccines. We encourage everyone to get vaccinated—it’s never too late to get your COVID-19 vaccine or booster.”

According to CDC data, the latest seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases is 586,391, about three times what it was two weeks ago. About 95% of new infections are from the highly contagious omicron variant, the agency said Tuesday.