Covid-19: What is the best vaccine? The effects of vaccinations, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations for older adults in the United States
The US is nearing the second anniversary of its first Covid-19 vaccinations, and although the coronavirus is still causing thousands of illnesses and deaths, the vaccines have made living with the virus more manageable.
Don’t wait. If you wait, you put yourself at risk,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Friday at an AARP event. The late fall and early winter season begins. We’re all going to congregate with our families and friends for the holidays. If you are up to date, it’s great. Get vaccine now if you are not.
“The most important thing every American can do to reduce their likelihood of having significant, preventable health issues in the next three to six months is to go get an updated Covid vaccine,” Jha said. We need to make sure that anyone older than 50 with high risk conditions is given treatments if they do get infections. Treatments are widely available.
Respiratory viruses are known to spread quickly in winter, when people people head indoors and gather for holiday celebrations. The UK and Europe have had a number of rising Covid-19 cases, which may be a sign of things to come in the US. The Omicron BA.5 subvariant continues to dominate even though other variations are starting to spread.
Two studies by the CDC show that the bivalent vaccine’s effectiveness against COVID-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations is especially good for older people.
The study analyzed and extrapolated data from 26.8 million older Americans and others enrolled in a Medicare fee-for-service health plan through the end of 2021. It included data from the Delta and Omicron surges last year.
The Vaccination of the Omicron and the BA.4/BA.5 CODi-19 Variants with Moderna and Pfizer
“This report that they have issued, I believe, doubles down on the work that we’re doing on vaccination, why it’s so important to continue this effort and to get the right information out to Americans who can benefit and ultimately stay alive, stay healthy, stay out of the hospital and help us defeat Covid once and for all,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said Friday.
–Children under age 6 who’ve already gotten two original doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine can get a single booster of Moderna’s updated formula if it’s been at least two months since their last shot.
The bivalent booster vaccine, authorized in September, protects against the original strain of the coronavirus as well as the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
70% of our doses are being used to boost doses and thats because everyone has already been vaccination. That is where the opportunity can be found to help protect people. According to Dr. Dubovsky, Novavax is excited about this in the US.
Moderna and Pfizer have updated their vaccine to match the dominant strains, the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron. Most CODi-19 cases are taken care of by the BA.5 descendants.
In September, the CDC suggested a booster to protect against the omicron variant. The new booster targets a component of the omicron variant and a component of the original virus strain to offer both broad and omicron-specific protection.
The data points to the fact that the current vaccine seems to work fine against the variants that are circulating right now, when it has a very extensive safety database.
Indications for New Covid-19 Antibodies in the U.S. from Scrabble-based Random Walks of the Pseudogap
In the clinical trials, side effects were mild and lasted about two days. The most common side effects when using the Novavax booster were pain, fatigue, muscle pain and headaches.
In the United States, these are BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, BA.4.6, BA.2.75 and BA.2.75.2. In Singapore, a new wave of cases is believed to be the result of the rapid rise in the variant XBB. Cases are also rising in Europe and the UK, where these variants have taken hold.
According to Dr. Peter Hotez, who is in charge of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, they use the same letters in Scrabble as Q, X and B, which makes them a variant of the board game.
As the US moves into the fall, Covid-19 cases are dropping. Normally, that would be a reason for hope that the nation could escape the surges of the past two pandemic winters. Experts fear that the downward trend may be reversing itself thanks to this gaggle of new variants.
The percentage of new Covid-19 infections caused by the BQs has doubled in recent weeks, making them a threat to BA.5 which is a highly fit virus.
The United States still will have Covid-19 pharmaceuticals like Paxlovid, molnupiravir and remedsivar for those at risk of serious complications if the antibodies stop working.
But the new variants are particularly devastating for millions of Americans who have weakened immune systems. The US government has run out of money to create new antibodies that can be used to treat and prevent severe Covid-19 cases and new research indicates that the last lab-created ones are impervious to certain changes in these variants.
Convergent Evolution of the Omicron Subvariant: New Infections and Vaccination Strategy for the Covid-19 Epidemic
convergent evolution happens when a group of new descendants of the same Omicron family tree share many of the same defects.
The experts believe that the convergence is a sign of a new phase of evolution of the virus, one that will affect circulation of several different strains at the same time.
“What is likely to happen is that we have several co-circulating, semi-dominate lineages going into the winter season,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
There is a chance several different lineages can get similar transmissibility levels compared to one new variant taking over.
“This is what predominantly happens for most pathogens, such as the flu and RSV,” Grubaugh wrote in an email. Most of the circulating virus has high fitness, since it has adapted well to human transmission.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the Covid-19 response technical lead for the World Health Organization, said Wednesday that the large mix of new variants was becoming more difficult for WHO to assess because countries were dialing back on their surveillance.
The Omicron subvariant BA.5 holds the top spot in the US. BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 are among the new sublineages that are being outcompeted by it thanks to the fact that it caused 70% of new infections in the US last week.
Fauci told CNN that most people think BA.5 will go off as the dominant variant in November and that they will be a substantial proportion.
Genetic drift is what causes these variants to be different from BA.4 and BA.5. So they share many parts of their genomes with that virus.
The changes are on a smaller scale than when the original Omicron arrived. That strain of the virus, which is now long gone, came out of genetic left field, leaving researchers and public health officials scrambling to catch up.
If people just got the shot, it would still escape the protection of the vaccine, Fauci said.
People who received the bivalent booster were half as risky to be hospitalized as people who had received two to four jabs of the original vaccine. People who got two or four vaccine doses before getting a bivalent booster had a reduced risk of hospitalization.
Can the Omicron Vaccine Sufficient Anti-Immune Therapy Outperform the BA.4 Wave? Evidence from the Scripps Research Institute
“It’s probably going to be significantly bigger than the BA.5 wave, at least that’s what I expect,” said Mark Zeller, a project scientist who monitors variants at the Scripps Research Institute. Zeller doesn’t believe this winter’s surge will reach heights of January’s Omicron wave.
The changes in the genes of these strains help them escape the immunity created by vaccines and previous infections, a recipe for re Infections and breakthrough infections for people who haven’t had an updated booster.
Anti-Immune Therapy is very important for people with immune function that has been compromised by drugs, disease or age. These are the same people whose bodies don’t respond robustly to vaccines.
It would take us many months to bring a monoclonal into the marketplace if we had the money today.
The administration is looking at ways to get out of the business of buying vaccines and therapies by creating new products that can be sold to consumers and insurers. But Jha says the process has to be guided by “the needs on the ground and the realities of the virus.”
He expects that the Biden administration will try to get Congress to give more money to encourage the production of new therapies because of the current realities.
The vaccine caused some people to feel a little uncomfortable, but this will assure them that the vaccine actually works in a good way.
Older adults who received an updated booster a week or more prior to the start of their illness had a lower risk of hospitalization than their unvaccinated counterparts. The study also wasn’t able to analyze the effect of previous infection with SARS-CoV-2.
“I don’t want a patient to tell me that, ‘Golly, I didn’t get any reaction, my arm wasn’t sore, I didn’t have fever. The vaccine didn’t work.’ Dr. William Schaffner was not involved in the new study, but he does not want that conclusion to be out there.
Meanwhile, antibody reactivity was observed in 444 or 99% of participants with systemic symptoms, 99% of those with only local symptoms and 98% of those with no symptoms.
When someone gets any vaccine, it can take a few weeks to build up immunity and generate its full protection. The data showed that the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 neutralizing antibody levels increased for all study participants after the new booster was given, compared to older adults who got the original vaccine. In adults 18 to 55, neutralizing antibodies were 10 fold higher than before.
“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,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “These updated data also provide confidence in the adaptability of our mRNA platform and our ability to rapidly update the vaccine to match the most prevalent strains each season.”
The vaccine against the other variants of the virus is still being tested, as are the updated boosters, by Pfizer and BioNTech.
The Food and Drug Administration’s decision aims to better protect the littlest kids amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases around the country — at a time when children’s hospitals already are packed with tots suffering from other respiratory illnesses including the flu.
–Pfizer’s vaccine requires three initial doses for tots under age 5 — and those who haven’t finished that vaccination series will get the original formula for the first two shots and the omicron-targeted version for their third shot.
The FDA expects data from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech sometime next month to determine whether those tots will need an omicron-targeted booster “and we will act on that as soon as we can,” he said.
“It’s going to take a lot of money, but what does it take”: A joint analysis of the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health
To determine exactly how much the shots have helped, researchers from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health created a computer model of disease transmission that incorporated demographic information, people’s risk factors, the dynamics of infection and general information about vaccination.
The CDC recommends masking for anyone who’s on public transportation. It also encourages people to wear one in other places where the level of transmission is high. People who are at high risk of severe illness should wear masks even in areas with only medium community levels.
In September, the senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation said it was going to be an uphill battle. I think it’s difficult to sell because of where we are right now.