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Tag: Vaccines

  • A robust booster campaign could prevent millions of missed school days among children ages 5 to 17, report finds

    A robust booster campaign could prevent millions of missed school days among children ages 5 to 17, report finds

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    If 80% of children ages 5 and older get their COVID booster shots by the end of 2022, it could prevent about 29 million missed days of school and almost 51,000 hospitalizations, according to a new report.

    And if COVID booster coverage simply matches 2020-21 flu-vaccination levels by year’s end, it would prevent about 22 million missed school days, said the report published by the Commonwealth Fund.

    “We expand our previous analysis to include the impact on pediatric hospitalizations, pediatric isolation days, and school absenteeism (among children ages 5 to 17), demonstrating both the health benefits of vaccination and the importance of vaccination uptake for maintaining uninterrupted in-school education,” the authors wrote in the report.

    The number of days absent from school was calculated based on five days of required isolation for children in that age group who experience mild symptomatic illness and 10 days for children who have severe illness or require hospitalization.


    Source: Commonwealth Fund

    An effective booster campaign would considerably reduce the strain on pediatric hospitals this winter, many of which are currently seeing high numbers of children with respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, and the flu, the authors wrote.

    “Throughout the pandemic, children have experienced direct health burdens as well as enormous upheaval in their personal and educational lives,” the report said. “Accelerated vaccination campaigns that achieve high coverage across all ages have the potential to prevent a possible imminent surge in COVID-19, protecting children both directly and indirectly and providing them with additional stability in terms of school attendance and other social engagement.”

    Now read: A strong fall COVID booster campaign could save 90,000 U.S. lives and avoid more than 936,000 hospitalizations, study finds

    The report comes as known U.S. cases of COVID are climbing again for the first time in a few months. The daily average for new cases stood at 39,459 on Monday, according to a New York Times tracker, up 4% versus two weeks ago.

    Cases are rising the most in the Southwest, led by Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico — states that are also seeing hospitalization numbers climb by more than 30% in the last two weeks.

    The daily average for U.S. hospitalizations was up 1% at 27,662.

    On a brighter note, the daily death tally continues to fall and is down 13% to 302 from two weeks ago.

    Physicians are reporting high numbers of respiratory illnesses like RSV and the flu earlier than the typical winter peak. WSJ’s Brianna Abbott explains what the early surge means for the winter months. Photo illustration: Kaitlyn Wang

    Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

    Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

    • China’s ruling party called for strict adherence to its hard-line “zero-COVID” policy Tuesday in an apparent attempt to guide public perceptions after regulations were eased slightly in places, the Associated Press reported. The news may disappoint Chinese citizens who have clashed with police and COVID workers to show their frustration over lockdowns and restrictions on movement. The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, said in an editorial that China must “unswervingly implement” the policy that requires mass obligatory testing and places millions under lockdown in an attempt to eliminate the coronavirus from the nation of 1.4 billion people.

    • Japan will lift a ban on international cruise ships that has lasted more than two and half years, transport officials said Tuesday, the AP reported separately. The ban was imposed following a deadly coronavirus outbreak on the cruise ship Diamond Princess at the beginning of the pandemic. The Transport Ministry said cruise-ship operators and port authorities associations have adopted antivirus guidelines and that Japan is now ready to resume its international cruise operations and to receive foreign ships at its ports.

    The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual COVID shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to COVID could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

    • Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen tested positive for COVID-19 after meeting with world leaders, including President Joe Biden, at a summit of Southeast Asian nations last week, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Hun Sen held one-on-one talks with Biden on Saturday on the sidelines of the regional discussions in Phnom Penh. Biden — who is on a five-day trip to Asia to attend a series of summits — then traveled to Bali, Indonesia, where he sat down on Monday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a face-to-face meeting that stretched over three hours.

    • Australia will overturn a three-year ban on tennis player Novak Djokovic entering the country, paving the way for the former top-ranked player to take part in the 2023 Australian Open, CNN reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter. Australian Immigration Minister Andrew Giles will lift the ban, the source said.

    Here’s what the numbers say:

    The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 635.6 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.61 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

    The U.S. leads the world with 98 million cases and 1,074,691 fatalities.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 227.8 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.6% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.

    So far, just 31.4 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 10.1% of the overall population.

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  • Attitudes towards corona vaccination among medical and nursing staff

    Attitudes towards corona vaccination among medical and nursing staff

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    Newswise — COLOGNE. Due to their close contacts with patients, people working in the medical and nursing fields have a higher risk of infecting themselves and others with the COVID-19 coronavirus. Being vaccinated is therefore essential not only for their own protection but also for their patients. Carolin Muschalik and co-authors from the Federal Center for Health Education (BZgA) have now asked whether (and to what extent) the attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination in this group differ from those in the general population, and whether identified differences could support recommendations for action (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2022;119.DOI: 10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0206).

    To address these questions, the authors carried out a Germany-wide survey in the framework of the CoSiD study between 9 July and 5 August, 2021, using computer-assisted web and telephone interviews. The attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination were collected using the so-called 5C scale, which describes five psychological reasons for or against vaccination. Based on their vaccination status, the views of medical and nursing personnel (n = 506) were compared with those of persons in the general population who were younger than 66 years old and not employed in a medical or nursing field (n = 1505). Differences between the reference group of unvaccinated medical and nursing personnel and the three other groups were determined using linear regressions for complex samples and controlled for age, education, and gender.

    The research team found that 82 percent of medical and nursing personnel had been vaccinated at least once, and 75 percent had been vaccinated twice, at the time of the survey. The vaccination rate was similarly high in the general population (81 and 64 percent, respectively). In both groups, unvaccinated people had significantly more negative views about the COVID-19 vaccination than vaccinated people, but unvaccinated medical and nursing personnel were more critical than the unvaccinated general population: they had stronger concerns about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine and less trust in decisions made by state authorities, and they were less likely to perceive being vaccinated as a collective responsibility. A similar percentage of unvaccinated persons in both groups thought that the COVID-19 vaccination was superfluous, and that COVID-19 did not pose a major threat.

    Based on these results, the authors see a need for specific measures to help convince unvaccinated medical and nursing personnel of the benefits of mandatory vaccination. In their opinion, the professional environment in these fields is particularly suitable for this.

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    Deutsches Arzteblatt international

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  • China eases some travel requirements in move welcomed by markets, even as it counts 10,000 new COVID cases in a day

    China eases some travel requirements in move welcomed by markets, even as it counts 10,000 new COVID cases in a day

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    China counted more than 10,000 fresh COVID cases on Friday sparking further restrictions on movement, but also eased some travel requirements in a move welcomed by financial markets.

    Beijing closed city parks and imposed other restrictions, even as millions of people remained under lockdown Friday in the West and south of China, the Associated Press reported. 

    The country reported 10,729 new cases on Friday, almost all of them testing positive while showing no symptoms. More than five million people were under lockdown Friday in the southern manufacturing hub Guangzhou and the western megacity Chongqing.

    The government said Friday it was reducing the amount of time incoming passengers would be required to undergo quarantine. The U.S. Embassy this week renewed its advisement for citizens to avoid travel to and within China unless absolutely necessary.

    Incoming passengers will only be quarantined for five days, rather than the previous seven, at a designated location, followed by three days of isolation at their place of residence, according to a notice from the State Council, China’s cabinet.

    It wasn’t immediately clear when and where the rules would take effect and whether they would apply to foreigners and Chinese citizens alike.

    Relaxed standards would also be applied to foreign businesspeople and athletes, in what appeared to be a gradual move toward normalization. The news will be welcomed by Chinese citizens frustrated by the government’s zero COVID policy that has kept many in their homes sometimes for months at a time, and forced them to take regular tests.

    In the U.S., known cases of COVID are climbing again for the first time in a few months. The daily average for new cases stood at 40,835 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, up 9% versus two weeks ago.

    As always, case numbers vary from state to state and some are seeing sharp spikes, led by Nevada, where cases have soared 176% from two weeks ago, the tracker shows. That’s followed by Utah, where they are up 77%, New Mexico at 62% and Oklahoma at 54%.

    Cases are rising in 32 states, as well as Washington, D.C., Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. They are up by double digits in 27 of those states.

    The daily average for hospitalizations was up 3% at 27,989, while the daily average for deaths is down 9% to 326. 

    Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

    Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

    • Four German regions — Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein — plan to scrap rules requiring people infected with the coronavirus to isolate at home, arguing that the pandemic has evolved and it’s time for a different approach, the AP reported. The health ministry pointed to declining infections, effective vaccinations, a high degree of population immunity, milder illnesses and the example of countries such as Austria that have loosened rules. “The decision doesn’t mean that we will give free rein to infections,” said Bavarian state health minister Klaus Holetschek. “People who test positive will in the future have to put on a mask outside their own apartment. And of course, the principle still goes that people who are sick stay at home.”

    • Sanofi
    SAN,
    -5.22%
    won European Union approval for its COVID vaccine booster, jointly made with British partner GSK
    GSK,
    -5.65%

    GSK,
    -6.01%    ,
    after a drawn-out development effort that saw the pair fall behind now-dominant vaccine suppliers, Reuters reported. The shot with the brand name VidPrevtyn Beta can be given to people who have already had a primary course of vaccination from other approved shots, the French drugmaker and the European Medicines Agency said in separate statements. Shipments are ready to be distributed to European countries under advance purchase agreements, Sanofi said. The company said last year that the European Union and Britain had ordered a combined 75 million doses of the shot, contingent on approval.

    • U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected a bid to prevent New York City from enforcing its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers against a group of teachers, firefighters and others who challenged the policy, Reuters reported separately. The justice denied an emergency request, received by the court on Nov. 4, to block the policy by individual municipal workers, as well as a group called New Yorkers For Religious Liberty, while their appeal of lower court decisions siding with the city proceeds.

    Here’s what the numbers say:

    The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 634.3 million on Friday, while the death toll rose above 6.60 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

    The U.S. leads the world with 97.9 million cases and 1,074,485 fatalities.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 227.8 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.6% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.

    So far, just 31.4 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 10.1% of the overall population.

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  • Annual COVID Shots Mean We Can Stop Counting

    Annual COVID Shots Mean We Can Stop Counting

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    A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me how many COVID shots I’d gotten so far. And for a brief, wonderful moment, I forgot.

    “Three,” I told them, before shaking my head. “No, actually, four.” I had no trouble recalling when I’d received my most recent shot (September). But it took me a moment to tabulate all the doses that had preceded it.

    By this point in the pandemic, a lot of people must be losing track. “I actually think this is a good thing,” says Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford, and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Now that so many Americans have racked up several shots or infections, she told me, the question is no longer “‘How many doses have you gotten cumulatively?’ It’s ‘Are you up to date for the season?’”

    The flip is subtle, but it marks a rethink of the COVID-vaccination paradigm. We’re at a define-the-relationship moment with these shots, when people are trying to commit—to normalize them as a routine part of our lives. At a September ACIP meeting, CDC officials noted that “we are changing the way we are thinking about these vaccines,” and trying to “get on a more regular schedule.” If COVID shots are here for good, then at least we can be rid of the bother of counting them.

    Read: It’s a bad time to be a booster slacker

    Counting doses was more apt early in the vaccine rollout, when it seemed that two jabs (or even one) would be enough to get Americans “fully vaccinated” and out of the danger zone. When more shots followed, they were often advertised with confusing finality: What some initially described as the booster was later retconned as the first booster after a second one was recommended for certain groups. But with immunity against infection more fragile than some hoped, and a virus that quickly shapeshifts out of antibodies’ grasp, those ordinal adjectives have stopped making sense. Until our vaccine tech becomes much more durable or variant-proof, repeat doses will be, for most of us, a fixture of the future—and it won’t do anyone much good to say, “‘I’m on shot 15’ or ‘I’m on shot 16,’” Angela Shen, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.

    The numbers certainly matter when they’re small: It will continue to be important for people to count off their first few shots, for instance, especially those without a history of infections. But after that initial set of viral-spike-protein exposures, the total count is moot. In most cases, about three vaccinations or infections—preferably vaccinations, which are both safer and easier to accurately track—should be “enough to fully charge up the immune system’s battery” for the first time, says Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Further COVID shots will help only insofar as they can recharge the battery toward max capacity when it starts to lose its juice. Scheduling a vaccine, then, becomes a matter of “how long it’s been since your last immunity-conferring event,” regardless of how many exposures a body has racked up, says Avnika Amin, a vaccine epidemiologist at Emory University.

    People who are immunocompromised may need four or more shots to establish that initial immunity charge, and their own (maybe smaller) peak capacity. But ultimately, the threshold effect they experience—a point of “diminishing returns”—is similar, says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington. Given how many vaccinations and infections the U.S. has now logged, the majority of Americans “can be done with counting,” she told me.

    If we’re going to shift our focus to timing shots, instead of counting them, we’ll have to schedule our shots smartly. Several prominent figures have already come out and said that yearly doses are a top choice. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, has been pushing that idea since early 2021; Peter Marks, who heads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, has been delivering a similar line for several months. Even President Joe Biden has endorsed the annual approach, noting in a September statement that the debut of the bivalent shot heralded a new phase in COVID vaccination, in which Americans would receive a dose “once a year, each fall.”

    That plan is not unreasonable. Shots will have to come with at least some regularity, as variants keep rolling in and immunity against infection ebbs. But re-dose prematurely with a shot with similar ingredients, and the body—still hopped up from the previous dose—may destroy the vaccine before it has much effect, making it about as useful as charging a battery that’s already at 95 percent. SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels drop off steeply in the first six months following a vaccine dose, and then, the rate of drain slows down. It’s as if the immune system goes into “power-saver mode,” Goel told me, which means there might not be a huge difference between revaccinating twice a year or only once. Plus, living out much of the year with lower antibody levels is not as worrisome as it might sound. Although antibodies can be a rather useful proxy for our level of protection, especially against infection, they don’t paint the whole defensive picture: T cells and other fighters tend to stick around for far longer, maintaining safeguards against severe disease. (The immunocompromised and older people may still need more frequent COVID-immunity top-offs.)

    Read: Are we really getting COVID boosters every year forever?

    The optimal pace for COVID vaccination will also depend on the speed at which the virus spews out variants. A yearly schedule works for influenza, Shen told me, but “we know flu’s cadence.” SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t yet settled down into a predictable, seasonal pattern; its waves aren’t relegated to the chilliest months. The degree to which we, as the coronavirus’s hosts, tamp down transmission also matters quite a bit. Having more virus around puts more pressure on vaccines to perform, especially when there aren’t many other mitigation measures in place. If all this talk of “once a year, each fall” turns out to be another red-herring recommendation, Amin told me, it could undermine any messaging that follows.

    All of that said, the autumn regimen may yet stick around because it’s the easiest approach. Flu-shot uptake is far from perfect, but the messaging around it is “simple and clean,” says Rupali Limaye, a behavioral scientist and vaccine-attitudes researcher at Johns Hopkins. After dosing up twice in four weeks as infants, people are asked to get a yearly shot, and that’s it. Compare that with the most convoluted days of COVID vaccination, when people couldn’t dose up without accounting for their age, health status, number of previous doses, vaccine brand, time since last dose, and more. “That’s absolute overload,” Limaye told me. Complicated schedules burn people out—or dissuade them from showing up at all. This fall, when the bivalent shot debuted, a troubling proportion of Americans didn’t even know they were eligible.

    Encouraging COVID vaccines at the same, straightforward pace as flu shots would make it easy for people to sign up for both at once, and maybe, eventually, to get them in the same syringe. Vaccines tend to ride one another’s coattails, Shen told me. “In the fall, there’s a bump in other routine vaccines,” she said, because people “are already there for their flu shot.” It would also make a big difference if the COVID-vaccine recipes changed for everyone at the same time, as they do for flu.

    Read: When’s the perfect time to get a flu shot?

    If we’re going to pivot from numbering doses to timing them, we might as well take the opportunity to discard the term booster as well. Some people don’t understand what it means, Limaye told me, or they default to a logical question—How many more boosters will I need? Plus, booster may no longer fit the science. “When we start updating formulas, it’s not really a booster anymore,” Amin told me. That’s not how we generally talk about flu shots: I certainly couldn’t tell you how many “boosters” of that vaccine I’ve had. (I don’t know, maybe 14? 15?) Pivoting to a terminology of “seasonal shots” could make COVID vaccination that much more routine.

    So, fine, if anyone should ask: I’ve had (count ’em: one, two, three) four doses of the vaccine so far. But more important, I’ve gotten the shot most recently available to me.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Study reveals vaccine confidence declined considerably during COVID-19 pandemic

    Study reveals vaccine confidence declined considerably during COVID-19 pandemic

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    Newswise — A new study suggests that, despite the success of the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, vaccine confidence has declined significantly since the start of the pandemic.

    Researchers from the University of Portsmouth carried out two anonymous surveys in the winters of 2019 and 2022 to investigate people’s attitudes towards vaccinations and the factors that might underpin hesitancy and refusal.

    By comparing the responses of more than 1,000 adults overall, they found the post-pandemic group was considerably less confident in vaccines than in the pre-pandemic one.

    The paper, published in the medical journal Vaccine, revealed nearly one in four participants reported a fall in confidence since 2020, and this was observed regardless of participants’ age, gender, religious belief, education and ethnicity.

    Dr Alessandro Siani, Associate Head (Students) of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, said: “While vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon, COVID-19 vaccines have been met with particular hostility despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of their safety and effectiveness. 

    “This isn’t just among conspiracy theorists though, but also those who don’t consider themselves ‘anti-vaxxers’ and had supported other vaccination campaigns in the past.”

    Participants were asked how much they agreed with statements including: 

    • Vaccines are safe
    • I think vaccines should be a compulsory practice
    • I believe if I get vaccinated it would benefit the wellbeing of others
    • Vaccines are a necessity for our health and wellbeing

    In both surveys participants who held religious beliefs were significantly more vaccine-hesitant than atheist and agnostic ones, and individuals from Black and Asian backgrounds were more hesitant than those belonging to White ethnicities. However, gender showed no association with vaccine confidence.

    While these overall trends remained largely similar between the two surveys, some noteworthy changes were observed in the post-pandemic survey. For example, the analysis revealed that while in 2019 middle-aged participants were considerably more apprehensive about getting vaccinated than younger groups , this was not the case in the 2022 survey. 

    “This could be because  COVID-19 infections notoriously lead to more severe outcomes in older patients”, added Dr Siani.

    “Young people who are infected rarely experience severe symptoms that lead to hospitalisation and death, so it’s possible that many have become complacent and don’t feel the need to get vaccinated. On the other hand, older people may have been more wary of the consequences of the infection, and more appreciative of the protection offered by the vaccine.”

    While providing precious insight into how the pandemic affected the public perspectives on vaccinations, the study is not without limitations. The original survey was designed as a standalone piece of research, so a different group of people had to be sampled in 2022. This resulted in a cross-sectional study as opposed to a longitudinal one.

    Dr Siani explained: “We didn’t expect a worldwide pandemic to break out only a few months after carrying out the 2019 survey. Because our findings don’t reflect the changing opinions of the same group of people over time, but rather a comparison of responses provided by two different cohorts, they should be interpreted with a grain of salt.

    “However, the study is consistent with other observations suggesting that vaccine confidence may be yet another victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

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    University of Portsmouth

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  • Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent booster shows higher immune response, but new COVID cases climb back above 40,000 a day

    Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent booster shows higher immune response, but new COVID cases climb back above 40,000 a day

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    First the good news: Pfizer Inc. and Germany-based partner BioNTech SE said updated trial data for their omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent booster showed a “substantially higher” immune response in adults than the original COVID-19 vaccine.

    The companies said the Phase 2/3 clinical-trial data, collected one month after the boosters were given, also demonstrated that safety and tolerability profiles were similar to those of the original vaccine.

    The news sent Pfizer’s stock
    PFE,
    +0.51%
    rallying 1.7% and BioNTech’s U.S.-listed shares
    BNTX,
    +4.97%

    22UA,
    +4.11%
    surging 7.2% in morning trading.

    “As we head into the holiday season, we hope these updated data will encourage people to seek out a COVID-19 bivalent booster as soon as they are eligible in order to maintain high levels of protection against the widely circulating Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 sublineages,” said Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla.

    Only 8.4% of eligible Americans have received updated COVID booster shots, while 68.5% of the total population have completed the original primary series of vaccinations, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The bivalent booster has been authorized for emergency use in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration for people age 5 and older and has also been granted marketing authorization in the European Union for those age 12 and older.

    In another piece of good news, Pfizer and BioNTech shares were also lifted by a report in The Wall Street Journal that the Chinese government has agreed to approve the companies’ COVID-19 vaccines for foreign residents in China and has also held talks to approve those vaccines for the broader population.

    Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that China was working on a plan to end the practice of penalizing airlines that bring COVID-infected people into the country.

    Both reports boost hopes that China is slowly moving toward ending its zero-COVID policy, which has crimped China’s economy and acted as a drag on global growth.

    Now for the bad news.

    The seven-day average of new COVID cases topped 40,000 for the first time in a month and hospitalizations have also ticked higher, with more than half of U.S. states showing increases over the past two weeks.

    According to a New York Times tracker, the daily average of new cases rose to 40,101 on Thursday from 38,208 on Wednesday, and was up 6% from 14 days ago.


    The New York Times

    Nevada has seen a 96% jump in daily cases, followed by Tennessee with a 69% increase and Louisiana with a 68% rise, leading the 28 states that saw cases increase over the past two weeks.

    Still, daily cases were less than one-third of the summer high of more than 130,000 reached during the surge of the BA.5 variant, the data show.

    Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

    The daily average of COVID-related hospitalizations rose 2% to 27,252, while the number of people with COVID in intensive-care units (ICUs) fell 2% to 3,110.

    The daily average of COVID-related deaths fell 6% to a four-month low of 339.

    On a global basis, the total number of COVID cases has increased to 631.91 million, while deaths have reached 6,598,197, according to data provided by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. has seen a total of 97.69 million cases and 1,072,245 deaths.

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  • Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander Wants Everyone to Get Their Shot

    Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander Wants Everyone to Get Their Shot

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    Nov. 2, 2022 — When Jason Alexander performed in the musical Jerome Robbins’ Broadway in 1989, he got the flu. 

    Turns out, not getting the flu vaccine that year almost cost him a Tony award.

    “I missed six performances because my flu turned into bronchitis,” says Alexander, who has asthma and is best known for his role as George Costanza in Seinfeld. “I’ll never forget how the producers said ‘I don’t care how sick you are, get back on stage.’ I spent a solid week trying to do a very physically taxing show with bronchitis.”

    Though Alexander did go on to win the Tony, he never missed his annual flu shot again. That experience is just one reason he’s participating in a new flu campaign, a partnership between the American Nurses Association and flu vaccine maker Sanofi.

    Entitled “Not Today, Flu,” the campaign features Alexander encouraging people to get vaccinated and urge their loved ones to get a flu shot, too.

    This is all the more pressing as flu season is in full swing and experts are now warning of a “tridemic” this winter as COVID-19 restrictions have been eased. The CDC reports that this year’s flu season is coming on strong and early. Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 22, 443 flu-related hospitalizations were reported in the agency’s surveillance network, the highest number of hospitalizations reported at this time of the season in 10 years.

    “With so much talk about vaccinations over the past 2 years, I understand why people are either avoiding or are hesitant about vaccinations,” Alexander says.  “But there’s concern in the medical community that this could be a devastating flu season if people don’t inoculate.”

    The goal of getting vaccinated: To keep people out of the hospital and avoid respiratory complications.

    Turns out, Alexander knows a thing or two about hospital life. His mom was a nurse and he was often around sick people who were struggling to regain their health.

    “I grew up in and around the hospital where she worked,” he says. “I worked as a dishwasher and in the laundry room there. My mother would have been very happy if I gravitated toward the medical field, but I’m a functional idiot, so I went into this instead.”

    Ultimately, Alexander has just one message: Got get your shot as quickly as possible, especially with the holiday season right around the corner.

    “Because we’ve been in a pandemic and everybody has been staying away from each other, we’ve lost some of our natural immunity to the flu,” Alexander says. “This might be the first holiday season since the pandemic began that people are getting together with loved ones. Why derail that because you’re laid up with the flu!”

    And rest assured: The flu shot is safe.

    “There are no horror stories about the flu shot,” he says. “It’s been around your whole life, it’s been well tested, and it definitely won’t make keys stick to your forehead.”

    To find a flu shot near you, visit NotTodayFlu.

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  • Hospitalizations on the rise in New York City as new COVID strains spread rapidly

    Hospitalizations on the rise in New York City as new COVID strains spread rapidly

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    Hospitalizations are rising again in New York City with the spread of new COVID-19 subvariants that are better at evading immunity. Cases of flu and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, are also increasing.

    State data show about 1,100 patients hospitalized with COVID as of Oct. 24, up from 750 in mid-September, as the New York Times reported. Case numbers have held steady, although with many people testing at home where data are not being collected, those numbers are not reliable.

    Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the omicron sublineages named BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 accounted for 42.5% of all cases in the New York region in the week through Oct. 29, up from 37% the previous week.

    That was more than the BA.5 omicron subvariant, which accounted for 35.7% of new cases in the New York region in the latest week. The two sublineages were not even registering as recently as three weeks ago, demonstrating just how fast they are spreading.

    Experts are also concerned about a nationwide surge in RSV, which can cause breathing difficulties in small children and older adults and for which there is currently no vaccine.

    There was good news from Pfizer Inc., however, which said Tuesday that data from a late-stage trial of an RSV vaccine had proved effective in preventing severe illness in children up to 6 months old.

    The Phase 3 trial found that the vaccine, given to pregnant mothers, achieved vaccine efficacy of 81.8% in infants from birth through the first 90 days of life. The trial found efficacy of 69.4% through the first 6 months of life.

    Pfizer
    PFE,
    +3.14%
    said it expects to make its first U.S. regulatory application for the vaccine by the end of 2022 and to follow on with other regulatory bodies. It will also submit the results of the trial for peer review in a scientific journal.

    The daily U.S. average for new COVID cases stood at 37,665 on Monday, according to a New York Times tracker, which was flat as compared with two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was up 2% to 27,184, while the daily average for deaths was down 3% to 348. 

    Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

    Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

    • Apple 
    AAPL,
    -1.75%
    supplier Foxconn
    2317,

    said Tuesday it has quadrupled bonuses for workers at its Zhengzhou plant in central China as it seeks to quell discontent over COVID restrictions and retain staff at the giant iPhone manufacturing site, Reuters reported. Daily bonuses for employees, who are part of a Foxconn unit responsible for making electronics including smartphones, have been raised to 400 yuan ($55) a day for November from 100 yuan, according to the official WeChat account of Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant. The move comes after workers fled the site over the weekend to avoid COVID curbs after complaining about their treatment and provisions via social media.

    Workers at the world’s biggest assembly site for Apple’s iPhones walked out as Foxconn has struggled to contain a COVID-19 outbreak. The chaos highlights the tension between Beijing’s rigid pandemic controls and the urge to keep production on track. Photo: Hangpai Xinyang/Associated Press

    • The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Hong Kong stocks appeared to be rallying after an anonymous post on Chinese social media suggested that the government may intend to soften pandemic-related restrictions beginning in March. Other outlets also reported on the rumor. American depositary receipts for Chinese companies surged on the news.

    See: Alibaba and Nio among Chinese stocks surging as hopes build about potential reopening

    • Pfizer’s COVID antiviral Paxlovid brought in $7.5 billion in sales in the third quarter of the year, compared with a FactSet consensus of $7.6 billion. The drug company also reiterated guidance for Paxlovid revenues in 2022, saying it still expects $22 billion in sales for the year. The FactSet consensus is $22.5 billion. Pfizer raised its full-year revenue guidance for the company’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine by $2 billion to $34 billion. The guidance includes doses expected to be delivered in fiscal 2022, primarily under contracts signed as of mid-October.

    • AstraZeneca PLC’s
    AZN,
    +1.77%

    AZN,
    +0.90%
    COVID vaccine Vaxzevria has been granted full marketing authorization in the European Union, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant said Vaxzevria has been shown to be effective against all forms of the virus. Vaxzevria was originally granted conditional marketing authorization due to the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, it said.

    Here’s what the numbers say:

    The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 630.6 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.59 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

    The U.S. leads the world with 97.5 million cases and 1,070,429 fatalities.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.9 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.4% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.

    So far, just 22.8 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 7.3% of the overall population.

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  • New omicron subvariants accounted for more cases in New York region in latest week than BA.5, CDC data shows

    New omicron subvariants accounted for more cases in New York region in latest week than BA.5, CDC data shows

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    The omicron sublineages named BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 continued to spread in the U.S. in the week through Oct. 29, accounting for 27.1% of new cases nationwide, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

    The two accounted for 42.5% of all cases in the New York region, which includes New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, up from 37% the previous week. That was more than the BA.5 omicron subvariant, which accounted for 35.7% of new cases in the New York area in the latest week.

    The BA.5 omicron subvariant accounted for 49.6% of all U.S. cases, the data show.

    BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 were included in BA.5 variant data as recently as three weeks ago, because their numbers were too small to break out. BQ.1 was first identified by researchers in early September and has been found in the U.K. and Germany, among other places.

    Last week, the World Health Organization said that BQ.1 and another sublineage dubbed XBB do not appear to have immune-escape mutations that warrant being designated as variants of concern. However, BA.5 is still a variant of concern that is being closely monitored, said a statement from the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evolution.

    Workers in a manufacturing facility that assemble Apple Inc.’s
    AAPL,
    -1.66%
    iPhone in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou appear to have left to avoid COVID-19 curbs, with many traveling on foot for days after an unknown number of employees were quarantined in the facility after a virus outbreak, the Associated Press reported. 

    Videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms showed people who are allegedly Foxconn workers climbing over fences and carrying their belongings down a road.

    Separately, visitors to Shanghai Disneyland were left stranded at the park on Monday after the resort halted operations to comply with COVID-19 restrictions amid a new outbreak of the virus.

    In the U.S., known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where data are not being collected.

    The daily average for new cases stood at 36,869 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 2% from two weeks ago. The daily average for hospitalizations was up 3% to 27,415, while the daily average for deaths was down 6% to 352. 

    Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

    Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

    • With a downcast earnings season passing the halfway mark, results from financial-technology companies and vaccine makers will arrive this week amid questions about consumer spending as well as demand for COVID drugs, MarketWatch’s Bill Peters reported. Pfizer Inc.
    PFE,
    -1.82%
    will report earnings on Tuesday, followed by Moderna Inc.
    MRNA,
    -0.47%
    on Thursday. Analysts will have their eye on the state of COVID-19 vaccine and treatment sales and on what executives are anticipating for the full year, as they prepare for a private market for COVID medications and as more people shrug off the pandemic. Pfizer executives, during a call last week, said they intended to charge between $110 and $130 for a single-dose vial of the vaccine for U.S. adults when government purchases end. But they said they believe anyone who has health insurance shouldn’t have to pay anything out of pocket.

    The FDA authorized newly modified COVID-19 boosters to target the latest versions of the omicron variant. But as WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez explains, a key part of the decision-making process was changed with these new shots. Photo: Laura Kammermann

    • A number of young children are being hospitalized because of respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and it’s happening at an unusual time of year and among older children than in years past, MarketWatch’s Jaimy Lee reported. COVID may be a contributing factor, in part because many children were not exposed to RSV last season and also because a prior COVID infection or exposure may change the way a baby’s immune system responds to RSV and may lead to more severe illness from an RSV infection, according to Asuncion Mejias, a principal investigator with the Center for Vaccines and Immunity at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

    • On Saturday, more than 3,000 people took part in the first Pride march in South Africa since the COVID pandemic , celebrating the LGBT community and defying a U.S. warning of a possible terror attack in the area, the AP reported. The U.S. government this week warned of a possible attack in the Sandton part of Johannesburg, where the march took place. The South African government expressed concern that the U.S. had not shared enough information to give credibility to the alleged threat. Police said all measures had been taken to ensure safety in the area.

    Here’s what the numbers say:

    The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 630.2 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.58 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

    The U.S. leads the world with 97.5 million cases and 1,070,266 fatalities.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.9 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.4% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots.

    So far, just 22.8 million Americans have had the updated COVID booster that targets the original virus and the omicron variants, equal to 7.3% of the overall population.

     

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  • Study Identifies Key T Cells for Immunity Against Fungal Pneumonia

    Study Identifies Key T Cells for Immunity Against Fungal Pneumonia

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    Newswise — Researchers at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine have demonstrated in a mouse model that a specific type of T cell, one of the body’s potent immune defenses, produces cytokines that are necessary for the body to acquire immunity against fungal pathogens. This finding could be instrumental in developing novel, effective fungal vaccines.

    Despite vaccines being hailed as one of the greatest achievements of medicine, responsible for controlling or eradicating numerous life-threatening infectious diseases, no vaccines have been licensed to prevent or control human fungal infections.

    This lack proved especially deadly during the COVID-19 pandemic. In countries where steroids were widely used to suppress inflammation of the lungs, COVID-19 patients with preexisting conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes showed a greater likelihood of developing lethal fungal infections. 

    T Cells Could Produce Protective or Pathological Response

    “A particular type of T cell [TH17 cells] that expresses GM-CSF [granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor] was linked to greater severity of illness in people infected with the virus that causes COVID-19,” said Dr. Som Nanjappa, an assistant professor of immunology at the University of Illinois.

    “Our study shows that IL-17A+ CD8+ T cell (Tc17), which also expresses GM-CSF, is necessary for mediating fungal vaccine immunity without instigating hyperinflammation. So clearly, the antigen specificity of T cells—whether they target viral vs. fungal or bacterial pathogens—has a huge impact on whether they play a protective or detrimental role.”

    The article, “GM-CSF+ Tc17 cells are required to bolster vaccine immunity against lethal fungal pneumonia without causing overt pathology,” appeared in Cell Reports on October 25. Dr. Nanjappa’s coauthors on the study are Srinivasu Mudalagiriyappa, a former graduate student now a scientist with Insmed Incorporated, a global biopharmaceutical company focused on serious and rare diseases; Jaishree Sharma, a graduate student in the Department of Pathobiology; and Miranda D. Vieson, a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Pathobiology as well as a boarded veterinary pathologist in the college’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.

    T Cells for Fungal Vaccine Immunity

    In the study, colonies of mice were given an experimental fungal vaccine. The mice were then exposed to virulent fungal pathogen to cause lethal pulmonary infection. Researchers could determine the necessity of GM-CSF+ Tc17 cells to mediate vaccine immunity. Further, they found that IL-1 and IL-23 cytokines are necessary for eliciting GM-CSF+ Tc17 cells to vaccine. While IL-23 is dispensable for the long-term memory homeostasis of these cells, it is essential for vaccine immunity against pulmonary fungal infection.

    This study identifies a beneficial subset of T cells for fungal vaccine immunity that bolsters efforts to develop a vaccine platform containing suitable adjuvants to potentiate such a T cell subset.

    “In line with this, we have identified a functional phenotypic marker that could be targeted to enhance this subset to augment vaccine efficacy,” said Dr. Nanjappa. He recently received NIH-R01 funding to pursue this strategy for a fungal vaccine.   

    Read the study online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2022.111543

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    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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  • America’s COVID Booster Rates Are a Bad Sign for Winter

    America’s COVID Booster Rates Are a Bad Sign for Winter

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    And just like that, with the passing of Labor Day, fall was upon us. Seemingly overnight, six-packs of pumpkin beer materialized on grocery shelves, hordes of city dwellers descended upon apple orchards—and America rolled out new COVID boosters. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Since the beginning of the pandemic, cases in North America and Europe have risen during the fall and winter, and there was no reason to expect anything different this year. Spreading during colder weather is simply what respiratory diseases like COVID do. The hope for the fall booster rollout was that Americans would take it as an opportunity to supercharge their immunological defenses against the coronavirus in advance of a winter wave that we know is going to come.

    So far, reality isn’t living up to that hope. Since the new booster became available in early September, fewer than 20 million Americans have gotten the shot, according to the CDC—just 8.5 percent of those who are eligible. The White House COVID-19 response coordinator, Ashish Jha, said at a press conference earlier this month that he expects booster uptake to increase in October as the temperatures drop and people start taking winter diseases more seriously. That doesn’t seem to be happening yet. America’s booster campaign is going so badly that by late September, only half of Americans had heard even “some” information about the bivalent boosters, according to a recent survey. The low numbers are especially unfortunate because the remaining 91.5 percent of booster-eligible people have already shown that they’re open to vaccines by getting at least their first two shots—if not already at least one booster.

    Now the bungled booster rollout could soon run headfirst into the winter wave. The virus is not yet surging in the United States—at least as far as we can tell—but as the weather cools down, cases have been on the rise in Western Europe, which has previously foreshadowed what happens in the U.S. At the same time, new Omicron offshoots such as BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are gaining traction in the U.S., and others, including XBB, are creating problems in Singapore. Boosters are our best chance at protecting ourselves from getting swept up in whatever this virus throws at us next, but too few of us are getting them. What will happen if that doesn’t change?

    The whole reason for new shots is that though the protection conferred by the original vaccines is tremendous, it has waned over time and with new variants. The latest booster, which is called “bivalent” because it targets both the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and BA.5, is meant to kick-start the production of more neutralizing antibodies, which in turn should prevent new infection in the short term, Katelyn Jetelina, a public-health expert who writes the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told me. The other two goals for the vaccine are still being studied: The hope is that it will also broaden protection by teaching the immune system to recognize other aspects of the virus, and that it will make protection longer-lasting.

    In theory, this souped-up booster would make a big difference heading into another wave. In September, a forecast presented by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the CDC, showed that if people get the bivalent booster at the same rate as they do the flu vaccine—optimistic, given that about 50 percent of people have gotten the flu vaccine in recent years—roughly 25 million infections, 1 million hospitalizations, and 100,000 deaths could be averted by the end of March 2023.

    But these numbers shouldn’t be taken as gospel, because protection across the population varies widely and modeling can’t account for all of the nuance that happens in real life. Gaming out exactly what our dreadful booster rates mean going forward is not a simple endeavor “given that the immune landscape is becoming more and more complex,” Jetelina told me. People received their first shots and boosters at different times, if they got them at all. And the same is true of infections over the past year, with the added wrinkle that those who fell sick all didn’t get the same type of Omicron. All of these factors play a role in how much America’s immunological guardrails will hold up in the coming months. “But it’s very clear that a high booster rate would certainly help this winter,” Jetelina said.

    At this point in the pandemic, getting COVID is far less daunting for healthy people than it was a year or two ago (although the prospect of developing long COVID still looms). The biggest concerns are hospitalizations and deaths, which make low booster uptake among vulnerable groups such as the elderly and immunocompromised especially worrying. That said, everyone aged 5 and up who has received their primary vaccine is encouraged to get the new boosters. It bears repeating that vaccination not only protects against severe illness and death but has the secondary effect of preventing transmission, thereby reducing the chances of infecting the vulnerable.

    What will happen next is hard to predict, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me, but now is a bad time for booster rates to be this low. Conditions are ripe for COVID’s spread. Protection is waning among the unboosted, immunity-dodging variants are emerging, and Americans just don’t seem to care about COVID anymore, Osterholm explained. The combination of these factors, he said, is “not a pretty picture.” By skipping boosters, people are missing out on the chance to offset these risks, though non-vaccine interventions such as masking and ventilation improvements can help, too.

    That’s not to say that the immunity conferred by the vaccination and the initial boosters is moot. Earlier doses still offer “pretty substantial protection,” Saad Omer, a Yale epidemiologist, told me. Not only are eligible Americans slacking on booster uptake, but lately vaccine uptake among the unvaccinated hasn’t risen much either. Before the new bivalent shots came around, less than half of eligible Americans had gotten a booster. “That means we are, as a population, much more vulnerable going into this fall,” James Lawler, an infectious-diseases expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told me.

    If booster uptake—and vaccine uptake overall—remains low, expecting more illness, particularly among the vulnerable, would be reasonable, William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told me. Hospitalizations will rise more than they would otherwise, and with them the stress on the health-care system, which will also be grappling with the hundreds of thousands of people likely to be hospitalized for flu. While Omicron causes relatively minor symptoms, “it’s quite capable of producing severe disease,” Schaffner said. Since August, it has killed an average of 300 to 400 people each day.

    All of this assumes that we won’t get a completely new variant, of course. So far, the BA.5 subvariant targeted by the bivalent booster is still dominating cases around the world. Newer ones, such as XBB, BQ.1.1, and BQ.1, are steadily gaining traction, but they’re still offshoots of Omicron. “We’re still very hopeful that the booster will be effective,” Jetelina said. But the odds of what she called an “Omicron-like event,” in which a completely new SARS-CoV-2 lineage—one that warrants a new Greek letter—emerges out of left field, are about 20 to 30 percent, she estimated. Even in this case, the bivalent nature of the booster would come in handy, helping protect against a wider crop of potential variants. The effectiveness of our shots against a brand-new variant depends on its mutations, and how much they overlap with those we’ve already seen, so “we’ll see,” Omer said.

    Just as it isn’t too late to get boosted, there’s still time to improve uptake in advance of a wave. If you’re three to six months out from an infection or your last shot, the best thing you can do for your immune system right now is to get another dose, and do it soon. Though there’s no perfect and easy solution that can overcome widespread vaccine fatigue, that doesn’t mean trying isn’t worthwhile. “Right now, we don’t have a lot of people that feel the pandemic is that big of a problem,” and people are more likely to get vaccinated if they feel their health is challenged, Osterholm said.

    There’s also plenty of room to crank the volume on the messaging in general: Not long ago, the initial vaccine campaign involved blasting social media with celebrity endorsers such as Dolly Parton and Olivia Rodrigo. Where is that now? Lots of pharmacies are swimming in vaccines, but making getting boosted even easier and more convenient can go a long way too. “We need to catch them where they come,” said Omer, who thinks boosters should be offered at workplaces, in churches and community centers, and at specialty clinics such as dialysis centers where patients are vulnerable by default.

    After more than two years of covering and living through the pandemic, believe me: I get that people are over it. It’s easy not to care when the risks of COVID seem to be negligible. But while shedding masks is one thing, taking a blasé attitude toward boosters is another. Shots alone can’t solve all of our pandemic problems, but their unrivaled protective effects are fading. Without a re-up, when the winter wave reaches U.S. shores and more people start getting sick, the risks may no longer be so easy to ignore.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • Pfizer Plans to Charge Over $100 Per COVID Shot in 2023

    Pfizer Plans to Charge Over $100 Per COVID Shot in 2023

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    By Cara Murez 

    HealthDay Reporter

    MONDAY, Oct. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Some Americans could pay up to $130 to get a COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer starting in 2023, but most will still get it for free.

    A Pfizer executive noted that people who would get its vaccine for free would likely include those on public health insurance programs such as Medicare or Medicaid and those with private health insurance, the Associated Press reported.

    Recommended vaccines must be covered by insurers as part of the Affordable Care Act. Pfizer also has an income-based assistance program for eligible U.S. residents.

    The U.S. government is expected to stop buying and distributing the shots sometime next year, the AP said.

    While Pfizer said last year it was charging $19.50 per dose to the U.S. government, that increased to about $30 per shot in June. The company has said it had three tiers of pricing globally, depending on a country’s financial situation, the AP reported.

    The newest price reflects both commercial distribution costs and switching to single-dose vials, Pfizer executive Angela Lukin said last week, the AP reported.

    That is well below expected limits “for what would be considered a highly effective vaccine,” Lukin added.

    By comparison, annual flu shots range from $50 to $95, depending on the specific type, according to CVS Health, the AP said.

    Pfizer’s vaccine, which starts with two initial doses, is the most commonly used shot to prevent COVID-19 in the United States.

    Americans have been vaccinated with 375 million doses of the original Pfizer vaccine since late 2020, plus 41 million doses of an updated booster shot, CDC data shows.

    The company’s revenue for the shots was $36.8 billion last year and is expected to be $32 billion this year, according to FactSet. Sales are expected to fall after that, the AP said.

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  • Child respiratory virus cases overwhelms hospitals

    Child respiratory virus cases overwhelms hospitals

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    Child respiratory virus cases overwhelms hospitals – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    A 2-month-old boy is in Piedmont Athens Regional hospital with a respiratory virus called RSV. Luciano Velasquez’s mother, Megan, said she noticed something was wrong with her baby when she could see the skin pulling around his rib cage as he breathed. Omar Villafranca has more.

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  • SARS-CoV-2 placentitis, and how maternal COVID-19 vaccination could prevent stillbirth

    SARS-CoV-2 placentitis, and how maternal COVID-19 vaccination could prevent stillbirth

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    Drucilla J. Roberts, MD, from the Mass General Department of Pathology and colleagues recently published a literature review in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, titled SARS-CoV-2 Placentitis, Stillbirth and Maternal COVID-19 Vaccination: Clinical-Pathological Correlations.

    What was the question you set out to answer with this review?

    Stillbirth is a recognized complication of COVID-19 in pregnant women that has recently been demonstrated to be caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection of the placenta.

    This infection caused by the virus has been termed SARS-CoV-2 placentitis, and can negatively impact more than 75% of the placenta, effectively rendering it incapable of performing its function of providing oxygen to the fetus.

    To combat this occurrence, we wanted to know if vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 protects against stillbirth that is caused by SARS-COV-2 placentitis.

    What are two or three key takeaways?

    • In all reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 placentitis causing stillbirth and neonatal death, the mothers were unvaccinated.
    • The development of SARS-CoV-2 placentitis likely involves both viral and immunological factors.
    • Maternal COVID-19 vaccination may be life-saving for the fetus as well as the mother.

    What were your conclusions?

    After reviewing the relationship between stillbirth and vaccination of mothers, we have found that vaccination appears to protect against COVID-19 related stillbirth.

    Pregnant women with COVID-19 have an increased risk for stillbirth compared to uninfected women, and those who vaccinate can more effectively prevent adverse conditions such as SARS-CoV-2 placentitis, infant death, preterm birth, and stillbirth.

    What are the potential clinical implications of your work?

    As far as clinical implications of this review, it is evident that pregnant people should be encouraged to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, to prevent adverse health events. 

    Paper cited:

    Schwartz, D. A., Mulkey, S. B., & Roberts, D. J. (2022). SARS-CoV-2 Placentitis, Stillbirth and Maternal COVID-19 Vaccination: Clinical-Pathological Correlations. American journal of obstetrics and gynecology, S0002-9378(22)00800-6. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2022.10.001

    About the Massachusetts General Hospital

    Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The Mass General Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with annual research operations of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 9,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In July 2022, Mass General was named #8 in the U.S. News & World Report list of “America’s Best Hospitals.” MGH is a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system.

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    Massachusetts General Hospital

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  • CDC shoots down false claims it will mandate COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren, saying states make that decision

    CDC shoots down false claims it will mandate COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren, saying states make that decision

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    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refuted claims that it’s planning to add the COVID-19 vaccine to immunization schedules for schoolchildren, saying that the authority for that decision lies with states and other local entities.

    The false claim spread after it was shared by Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a tweet this week, as the Associated Press reported. 

    Carlson tweeted that the agency would make the vaccine mandatory in order for children to attend school, a claim the CDC quickly shot down. While an advisory committee to the CDC voted to recommend that the vaccine be added to immunization schedules, the CDC “only makes recommendations for use of vaccines, while school-entry vaccination requirements are determined by state or local jurisdictions,” CDC spokeswoman Kate Grusich told the AP.

    Grusich explained that the action was meant to streamline clinical guidance for healthcare providers by adding COVID-19 vaccines to a single list of all currently licensed, authorized and routinely recommended vaccines.

    “It’s important to note that there are no changes in COVID-19 vaccine policy,” she said.

    The news comes as U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since mid-April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where data are not being collected.

    The daily average for new cases stood at 38,077 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 8% from two weeks ago. Cases are currently rising in 14 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

    The daily average for hospitalizations was down 2% to 26,669, although hospitalizations are rising in almost all northeastern states as cold weather arrives. The daily average for deaths was down 7% to 360.

    Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

    Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

    • Pfizer
    PFE,
    +4.42%
    is planning to sell the COVID vaccine it developed with German partner BioNTech
    BNTX,
    +9.88%
    for $110 -$130 a dose once the U.S. market for COVID-19 shots becomes commercial, likely in the first quarter of next year, MarketWatch’s Jaimy Lee reported. Pfizer and BioNTech are currently paid $30.50 per vaccine dose by the U.S. government, which contracted with the companies, as well as with other vaccine makers like Moderna
    MRNA,
    +9.07%
    and Novavax
    NVAX,
    +11.35%    ,
    and then made the COVID-19 shots available at no cost to people in the U.S. during the public-health emergency. The emergency declaration in the U.S. isn’t expected to be renewed next year, which will lead to the formation of an official commercial market for COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments. 

    • Johnson & Johnson
    JNJ,
    +1.91%
    said the volume of surgical procedures is returning to prepandemic levels in many parts of the world, a trend that cheered Wall Street and could bode well for other medical-technology heavyweights like Stryker Corp.
    SYK,
    +0.57%
    and Zimmer Biomet Holdings
    ZBH,
    +0.18%    .
    J&J, which reported earnings this week, said its medical-technology business had a “strong September,” with U.S. sales of hip and knee implants and other surgical devices rising 7.7% to $3.3 billion in the third quarter of the year. “We are seeing procedures recovering,” Ashley McEvoy, worldwide chair of J&J’s MedTech business, told investors during this week’s earnings call. “In the U.S., we started to see surgical procedures tick up, predominantly at the latter part of the quarter.”

    The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual COVID shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to COVID could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

    • “As China’s ruling Communist Party holds a congress this week, many Beijing residents are focused on an issue not on the formal agenda: Will the end of the meeting bring an easing of China’s at times draconian ‘zero-COVID’ policies that are disrupting lives and the economy?” the AP reported. It appears to be wishful thinking. As the world moves to a postpandemic lifestyle, many across China have resigned themselves to lining up several times a week for COVID tests, restrictions on travel to other regions and the ever-present possibility of a community lockdown.

    • Fantasy Fest, a 10-day annual party, is kicking off in Key West, Fla., on Friday, with a full slate of events for the first time since the pandemic started, the AP reported. “Due to the COVID pandemic, this will be the first full Fantasy Fest since 2019,” the festival’s board chair, Steve Robbins, said. “So I know our guests and staff are excited about getting back to the real Fantasy Fest.” Dozens of themed events are set for the festival, including a nighttime parade Oct. 29 featuring floats and elaborately costumed marching groups. Participants are encouraged to draw costume ideas from the festival’s theme, “Cult Classics & Cartoon Chaos,” and to portray characters inspired by favorite cartoons and television or film productions with a cult following.

    Here’s what the numbers say:

    The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 626.9 million on Friday, while the death toll rose above 6.57 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

    The U.S. leads the world with 97.2 million cases and 1,067,190 fatalities.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.5 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.2% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 111.4 million have had a booster, equal to 49.1% of the vaccinated population, and 26.8 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 40.6% of those who received a first booster.

    The CDC reports that some 19.4 million people have had a dose of the updated bivalent booster that targets omicron and its subvariants along with the original virus.

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  • Add COVID Shot to Routine Vaccine Schedule: CDC Panel

    Add COVID Shot to Routine Vaccine Schedule: CDC Panel

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    By Cara Murez and Robin Foster 

    HealthDay Reporters

    FRIDAY, Oct. 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) – In an unanimous vote on Thursday, a panel of U.S. vaccine experts recommended that COVID shots be added to the list of recommended vaccinations for children and adults.

    Now it’s up to the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention to decide whether to follow the advice of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

    Even if the agency does approve adding the shots to the schedule, it doesn’t amount to a vaccine mandate. State and local jurisdictions will still decide what vaccines are required for schools, NBC News reported.

    “Moving COVID-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Local control matters. And we honor that the decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and at the municipal level, if it exists at all.”

    “This discussion does not change that,” he told NBC News.

    An example of local jurisdictions making their own choices includes the HPV vaccine, which has been on the immunization schedule since 2006. Only Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., actually require it for both girls and boys. Virginia requires the vaccine for girls, NBC News reported.

    Despite having a recommended national vaccine schedule, vaccination rates for American children have dropped during the pandemic.

    COVID cases are also declining among U.S. children, totally close to 28,000 last week, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. It is the first time since early April that cases were under 30,000.

    An advantage to having COVID-19 shots on the vaccine schedule is that insurance providers typically will cover recommended vaccines. Though federal dollars are still paying for those vaccines, that will eventually end, NBC News reported.

    The COVID vaccines could also become a part of the federal Vaccines for Children program, which would provide them free to children covered by Medicaid.

    “By adding it to the VFC program, it now makes these vaccines available to these uninsured and underinsured children,” said Dr. Julie Morita, executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, former public health commissioner for Chicago and a former practicing pediatrician.

    Morita called the schedule the “gold standard” for clinicians.

    “I used to look every year, waiting for this vaccine schedule, to make sure I was following the best vaccination guidance available,” Morita told NBC News.

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  • Neither Pfizer nor the government ever claimed to have conducted studies on the vaccine’s effect on transmission in its original clinical trials

    Neither Pfizer nor the government ever claimed to have conducted studies on the vaccine’s effect on transmission in its original clinical trials

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    Fact Check By:
    Newswise

    Truthfulness: False

    Claim:

    In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission.
    “Get vaccinated for others” was always a lie.
    The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated.

    Claim Publisher and Date: Rob Roos MEP on 2022-10-11

    Rob Roos, an Dutch member of the European Parliament with a history of reiterating conservative talking points, claimed that the Pfizer director admitted that their COVID-19 vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission. On the show Tucker Carlson Tonight, Roos claimed that the delivery of the vaccine was “one of the greatest scandals of our time.” Many anti-vaccine advocates are sharing this news on social media under the hashtag #PfizerGate. The tweet and video have been shared by over 30k. The post implies both the company and public health officials misled the public in order to increase vaccination rates.

    The claim is rated false.  Pfizer didn’t claim to have tested its COVID-19 vaccine’s ability to prevent transmission, and this information was clearly available in press releases published by the European Medicines Agency as well as the published study containing results from Pfizer’s clinical trials. In fact, when the FDA announced the emergency authorization of the Pfizer COVID vaccine back in December 2020, they stated, “at this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.” The COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials were designed to study the vaccine’s safety and efficacy in preventing symptomatic disease, not transmission. 

    Katie Foss, Associate Director of Middle Tennessee State University’s School of Journalism and Strategic Media and author of Constructing the Outbreak responds to the claim:

    Epidemics in Media and Collective Media counters Roos’ claim and contextualizes how COVID-19  vaccine efficacy can be more accurately communicated in the media. “The downside of our digital landscape is that complex concepts can easily be reduced to sound bites and social media posts. These are then used out of context to make false claims, significantly undermining immunization campaigns. The important takeaway from COVID messaging is not that vaccinated people won’t contract the virus, but that they are far less likely to get seriously ill or die from the disease,” explains Foss.

     

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  • Will the Bivalent Booster Cause Worse Side Effects?

    Will the Bivalent Booster Cause Worse Side Effects?

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    For as long as my marriage lasts, my household will be divided by reactions to vaccines.

    I am, fortunately, speaking of physical reactions rather than ideological ones; my partner and I are both shot enthusiasts, a fact we verified on our first date. But if my immune system is a bashful wallflower, rarely triggering more than a sore arm in the hours after I get a vaccine, then my spouse’s is a party animal. Every immunization I’ve watched him receive—among them, four doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine—has absolutely clobbered him with fevers, chills, fatigue, and headaches for about a full day. When he got the flu shot and the bivalent COVID jab together a few weeks ago, he ended up taking his first day off work in more than a decade. As usual, the same injections caused me so few symptoms that I wondered if I was truly dead inside.

    “Why don’t you feel anything?” my spouse howled at me from the bedroom, where his sweat was soaking through the sheets. “Sorry,” I yelled back from the kitchen, where I was prepping four days’ worth of meals between work calls after returning from an eight-mile run.

    If this is how every autumn will go from now on, so be it: A few hours of discomfort is still worth the rev-up in defenses that vaccines offer against serious disease and death. But it’s not hard to see that gnarly side effects will only add to the many other factors that work against COVID-vaccine uptake, including lack of awareness, sloppy messaging, dwindling access, and spotty community outreach. Back in the spring, when I spoke with several people who hadn’t gotten boosters despite being eligible for many, many months, several of them cited the post-shot discomfort as a reason. Now I’m getting texts and calls from family members and friends—all up to date on their previous COVID vaccines—admitting they’ve been dillydallying on the bivalent to avoid those symptoms too. “I don’t know if we’re going to continue to get strong buy-in from the public if they have this sort of reaction every year,” says Cindy Leifer, an immunologist at Cornell University.

    Read: America created its own booster problems

    The good news, at least, is that experts told me they don’t expect this bivalent recipe—or future autumn COVID shots, for that matter—to be worse, side-effect-wise, than the ones we’ve received before. It’ll take a while for data to confirm that, especially considering that more than a month into this fall’s rollout, fewer than 15 million Americans have received the updated shot. But Kathleen Neuzil, a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has studied the performance of COVID vaccines in clinical trials, pointed out to me that the mRNA shots’ ingredients have been swapped out before without altering the rate of side effects. As the alphabet soup of variants began to sweep the world in early 2021, she told me, vaccine makers started to tinker with alternate formulations, sometimes combining multiple versions of the spike protein into a single shot—“and they’re all comparable.” (If anything, early data suggest that bivalent shots containing an Omicron variant spike may be easier to take.) The same goes for flu vaccines, which are also retooled each year: When measured across the population, the frequency and intensity of side effects remain more or less the same.

    On average, then, mRNA-vaxxed people can probably expect to have an annual experience that’s pretty similar to the one they had with their first COVID booster. As studies have shown, that one was actually better for most people than dose No. 2, the most unpleasant of the injections so far. (The math, of course, becomes tougher for people getting another vaccine, such as the flu shot, at the same time.) There are probably two main reasons why side effects have lessened overall, experts told me. First, the spacing: Most people received the second dose in their Pfizer or Moderna primary series just three or four weeks after the first. That’s an efficient way to get a lot of people “fully vaccinated” in a short period of time, but it means that many of the immune system’s defensive cells and molecules will still be on high alert. The second shot could end up fanning a blaze of inflammation that was never quite put out. In line with that, researchers have found that spacing out the primary-series doses to eight weeks, 12 weeks, or even longer can prune some side effects.

    Dose matters a lot too: Vaccines are, in a way, stimulants meant to goad the immune system into reacting; bigger servings should induce bigger jolts. When vaccine makers were tinkering with their recipes in early trials, higher doses—including ones that were deemed too large for further testing—produced more side effects. Each injection in Moderna’s primary series contains more than three times the mRNA packaged into Pfizer’s, and Moderna has, on average, caused more intense side effects. But Moderna’s booster and bivalent doses contain a smaller scoop of the stimulating material: People 12 and older, for instance, get 50 micrograms instead of the 100 micrograms in each primary dose; kids 6 to 11 years old get 25 micrograms instead of 50. (All of Pfizer’s doses stay the same size across primaries and boosters, as long as people stay in the same age group.) People who switch between brands, then, may also notice a difference in symptoms.

    It’s a tricky balance, though. Sometimes, the immune system adjusts the magnitude of its protection to match the danger posed by a pathogen (or shot), a bit like titrating a crisis response to the severity of a threat—so it’s important that vaccine makers don’t undershoot. For better or worse, the mRNA-based COVID vaccines do seem to cause a rougher response than most other vaccines, including annual flu shots. One of the offending ingredients might be the mRNA itself, which codes for SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. But Michela Locci, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that the mRNA’s packaging—a greasy fat bubble called a lipid nanoparticle—may be the more likely culprit. For some people, in any case, the side effects of COVID shots might be on par with those of the two-dose Shingrix vaccine, one of the most infamously reactogenic immunizations in our roster. Leifer, who has received both, told me the second dose of each “floored” her to about the same extent.

    The fact that I get fewer side effects than my spouse does not imply that I’m any less protected. A ton of factors—genetics, hormone levels, age, diet, sleep, stress, pain tolerance, and more—could potentially influence how someone experiences a shot. Women tend to have more reactive bodies, as do younger people. But there are exceptions to those trends: I’m one of them. The whole topic is understudied, Locci told me. Her own recent experience with the bivalent threw her for a loop. After her first, second, and third dose of Moderna each ratcheted up in side-effect severity, she cleared her calendar for the couple of days following her bivalent, “afraid I was going to be in bed with a fever again,” she said: “But it was a light headache for a morning, and then it was over.” She has no idea what next year will bring.

    Either way, side effects such as fevers and chills tend to be short-lived. “Very few side effects are severe,” Neuzil told me, “and COVID continues to be a severe disease.” Still, Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, hopes that scientists will keep developing new COVID vaccines that might come with fewer post-shot issues—including the very rare ones, such as myocarditis—without sacrificing immune protection. Lee doesn’t tend to react much to vaccines, but her daughter “always misses school the next day,” she told me. “I plan her shots for a Friday afternoon so she can lay out all Saturday.” Early on, when hardly anyone had immunity to the virus, signing everyone up for somewhat reactogenic shots was a no-brainer—especially given the hope that two doses would yield many, many years of protection. Now that we know it’s a repeated need, Neuzil said, “the equation changes a bit.”

    People aren’t totally helpless against side effects. Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, had an “awful, terrible” experience with his second and third doses, which slammed him with 102- and 103-degree fevers, respectively. He weathered the side effects without intervention, worried that a painkiller would curb not just the agony, but also his protective immune response. This time, though, armed with new knowledge from his own lab that anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving drugs don’t blunt antibody levels, “the first sign I feel even the slightest bit shitty,” he told me, “I’m dosing up.”

    I’ll probably do the same for my spouse the next time he’s due for a vaccine of any kind … likely while I chill on the sidelines. Bhattacharya’s spouse, too, is kind of an immune introvert, a fact that he bemoans. “Her only side effect was she felt thirsty,” he said. “It’s just not fair.”

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Pfizer sets new prices for its COVID-19 vaccines. The cost? $110 to $130 per dose

    Pfizer sets new prices for its COVID-19 vaccines. The cost? $110 to $130 per dose

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    Pfizer Inc.
    PFE,
    +4.17%
    said Thursday that it plans to sell the COVID-19 shot it developed with BioNTech SE
    BNTX,
    +7.14%
    for $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S. market for COVID-19 shots becomes commercial, likely in the first quarter of next year.

    Pfizer and BioNTech are currently paid $30.50 per vaccine dose by the U.S. government, which contracted with the companies (as well as other vaccine makers like Moderna Inc.
    MRNA,
    +6.57%
    and Novavax Inc.
    NVAX,
    +8.88%
    ) and then made the COVID-19 shots available at no cost to people in the U.S. during the public-health emergency.

    The emergency declaration in the U.S. isn’t expected to be renewed next year, which will lead to the formation of an official commercial market for COVID-19 vaccines, tests and treatments. That said, this change doesn’t mean most Americans will be on the hook to pay for their shots in 2023 and beyond.

    A recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis said most people with private insurance won’t be expected to pay anything out of pocket for the vaccines, though the costs may eventually be baked into the price of health-insurance premiums, as is done with flu shots. People with Medicare will have their shots covered by Medicare Part B, while those with Medicaid should also have coverage of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s the uninsured who may find it difficult to find free vaccines and boosters in the future.

    Wall Street analysts cheered the news, saying Pfizer’s pricing plan came in above expectations. It also bodes well for Moderna’s stock. SVB Securities upgraded the company to market perform from underperform, though the company has not yet announced its pricing plans for its COVID-19 shots.

    “Presuming that MRNA prices as a rational duopolist, this substantially improves the company’s ability to meet 2023 revenue guidance,” SVB analyst Mani Foroohar told investors.

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  • mRNA Vaccines Significantly Reduce Severity of Delta, Omicron COVID-19 Infections

    mRNA Vaccines Significantly Reduce Severity of Delta, Omicron COVID-19 Infections

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    Newswise — People who have received two or three doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine are significantly more likely to have milder illnesses if infected with the Delta or Omicron coronavirus variants than those who are unvaccinated, according to a nationwide study involving a team of University of Utah researchers.

    The study, which examined health care personnel, first responders and other frontline workers in Utah and five other states, builds on previous research that indicates mRNA vaccines provide protection against severe health outcomes associated with COVID-19 despite the variants’ increased transmissibility.

    “It’s encouraging that the mRNA vaccines hold up rather well against these variants,” said Sarang Yoon, D.O., associate professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at University of Utah Health. She is a study co-author who leads the Utah portion of the research and is part of the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, a partnership between the University of Utah and Weber State University. “We know that breakthrough cases are more likely with Delta and Omicron than the initial strain, but the vaccines still do a good job of limiting the severity of the infection.”

    The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It is the latest of several peer-reviewed papers resulting from the nationwide HEROES-RECOVER project funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Researchers examined 1,199 participants who developed COVID-19 infections. Of the participants, 24% were infected with Delta and 62% contracted Omicron, while 14% had the original virus strain.

    Delta highlights:

    • Participants who had received two vaccine doses were significantly less likely to be symptomatic than those who were unvaccinated (77.8% vs. 96.1%)
    • Symptomatic participants with a third dose were far less likely to experience fever or chills than those who were unvaccinated (38.5% vs. 84.9%) and experienced symptoms for an average of six fewer days (10.2 days vs. 16.4 days)

    Omicron highlights:

    • The risk of symptomatic infection was similar between participants with two vaccine doses and those who were unvaccinated, while those with three doses experienced a higher risk than the unvaccinated (88.4% vs. 79.4%)
    • Symptomatic participants with three doses were significantly less likely to experience fever or chills (51.5% vs 79%) or seek medical care (14.6% vs 24.7%) than the unvaccinated

    The authors noted that, while the study is among the largest of its kind examining COVID-19 vaccines over time and across variants, grouping participants by variant and vaccine status resulted in some combinations with relatively few people, affecting the precision of the findings. They also indicated that the study was not able to account for all factors influencing COVID-19 severity, which may skew the results. There were also results the authors characterized as “unexpected” among participants who received three doses and had symptomatic Omicron infections.

    Researchers gathered data between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 19, 2022. Participants submitted self-collected nasal swabs weekly regardless of COVID-19 symptoms, as well as at the beginning of experiencing signs of illness. Participants were excluded from the study if they had infections before the study start date, or if their infections occurred: sooner than 14 days after their second vaccine dose, sooner than seven days after their third dose or more than 149 days after their third dose.

    # # #

    Other co-authors associated with the University of Utah and Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health include Kurt Hegmann, M.D.; Matthew Thiese, P.h.D; Andrew Phillips, M.D.; Jenna Praggastis, B.S.; and Matthew Bruner, B.S.

    About University of Utah Health

    University of Utah Health  provides leading-edge and compassionate care for a referral area that encompasses Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and much of Nevada. A hub for health sciences research and education in the region, U of U Health has a $458 million research enterprise and trains the majority of Utah’s physicians and health care providers at its Colleges of Health, Nursing, and Pharmacy and Schools of Dentistry and Medicine. With more than 20,000 employees, the system includes 12 community clinics and five hospitals. U of U Health is recognized nationally as a transformative health care system and provider of world-class care.

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