Covid-19 Vaccine Failure, Fluctuations and Confusion: The Cases of Omicron and the First Born of the Genetic Left Field

A new Covid-19 wave appears to be brewing in Europe as cooler weather arrives, with public health experts warning that vaccine fatigue and confusion over types of shots available will likely limit booster uptake.

Their changes aren’t on the scale of what happened when the original Omicron arrived on the scene in November 2021. The strain that came out of the genetic left field left public health officials scrambling to catch up.

The number of cases in the European Union went up last week by 8% despite a dramatic fall in testing. Case numbers have declined around the world.

Hospital admissions with symptoms doubled in Italy during the week of October 4 compared to the previous week.

Some meeting panellists had concerns about the decision to use a bivalent formulation, rather than an updated single-strain one, in future vaccines. Scientists noted that there are few data on the effectiveness of bivalent vaccines when given as a primary series — particularly in young children, who make up a large proportion of the people now receiving a primary series in the United States. Some studies believe that the vaccine might be less effective against Omicron if it is included in the ancestral strain.

The latest boosters can only be used for a few people, including the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Public health experts said that the choice of vaccine as a booster is likely to add to confusion.

“For those who may be less concerned about their risk, the messaging that it is all over coupled with the lack of any major publicity campaign is likely to reduce uptake,” said Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “So on balance I fear that uptake will be quite a bit lower.”

Some scientists theorize on social media that the surge ofRSV hospitalizations might be caused by the fact that people with immune deficiencies are more susceptible to other infections. Miller says there is no proof for that and the surge in hospitalizations could be related to people who missed exposure in the past few years. There is a slightly bigger naive population, all of whom are at risk. There are more numbers going into the system.

The End of Covid-19 : Vaccine Dose Statistics in the European Union During the May/July 2014 General Resummation

The data shows that the weekly doses of vaccine in the EU were only between 1 million and 1.7 million over the course of the month, compared with 16 million per week in the previous year.

“There must be some complacency in that life seems to have gone back to normal – at least with regards Covid and people now have other financial and war-related worries,” said Adam Finn, chair of ETAGE, an expert group advising the WHO on vaccine preventable diseases in Europe.

Italy’s Gimbe science foundation said the government, soon to be replaced after an election, was ill prepared for the autumn-winter season, and highlighted that a publication on the government’s management of the pandemic had been blocked.

Meanwhile, British officials last week warned that renewed circulation of flu and a resurgence in Covid-19 could pile pressure on the already stretched National Health Service.

My last newsletter before I start my book leave is this one. I’ll be back in late January. I’ll be checking out the work of other Times journalists while they’re writing The Morning.

What do COVID-19 variants of concern look like when they first open up and open the door to new vaccines? And what do they tell us?

One thing that could shake COVID complacency is the emergence of one or more ‘variants of concern’ (VoCs). The new virus will be released over the next year. VoC designation will only be given if the variant is better at evading the immune system, causes more severe disease, or is much more transmissible than those currently circulating. A new VoC must spur action to ensure that fully vaccinated people — especially those who are older or immunocompromised — receive booster doses.

In the United States, there are five of these: BQ.1, B Q.1, BA.6, and BA.2.50. In other countries, the recombinant variant XBB has been rising quickly and appears to be fueling a new wave of cases in Singapore. There are more cases in Europe and the UK.

Dr. Peter Hotez, who co-directs the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, says he thinks of them collectively as the Scrabble variants because they use letters that get high scores in the board game like Q, X and B.

Just weeks before this announcement, the organization officially declared CO-VID-19 to be a disease. “It shut things down,” says O’Brien. In April, May, and June of 2020, there will be less than half of the number of doses given in the previous year.

Lumped together, the variants accounted for almost 1 in 3 new Covid-19 infections nationwide last week, according to the latest estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The basis of Evusheld, a preventive drug used for people with weakened immune systems who do not respond well to Covid-19 vaccines, was found by the end of April 2020. Made up of two lab-made antibodies, Evusheld mimics natural ones that fight infection. The drug can be evaded by the latest coronaviruses. The FDA pulled the product from the market, saying that it isn’t likely to work against the majority of Covid-19 versions in the United States.

Covid-19 is Convergent, and it’s Not Just a Case of Self-Initiation: How Will We Fail to End the Pandemic?

Though they each descend from slightly different branches of the Omicron family tree, these new offshoots have evolved to share many of the same mutations, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.

Some experts think the convergence means we have entered a new phase of evolution of the virus, one that will see circulation of several variant at the same time.

An associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health said that there will likely be several co-circulating, semi-dominate lineages going into the winter season.

“That’s because with convergent evolution, perhaps several different lineages can independently obtain similar transmissibility levels versus a single new variant taking over.

This is the main way in which the flu and other diseases usually occur, according to Grubaugh. Most of the virus circulating has high fitness since it has adapted well to human transmission.

In a statement Wednesday, the Covid-19 response technical lead said that it was becoming more difficult to assess the large mix of new variant because countries were less aggressive in their monitoring.

As we now know all too well, pandemic containment isn’t just a matter of policy and public investment. It’s a complex web of leadership, social trust and public buy-in — along with a fair amount of chance. It’s hard to believe that the country is capable of more vigilance and solidarity now than it was in early 2020. Vaccine skepticism may not necessarily outlast this pandemic, but the signs are worrying, and there has been precious little policy focus on what can overcome that skepticism. Public health officials have less faith in their ability to manage the Pandemic. The Biden administration, which was celebrating at the moment, is offering public-health guidance close to “you do you”, dumping millions of people off Medicaid, and turning the provision of new tests and booster shots to the private.

Bivalent vaccines against the COVID-19 and the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strains: Are they going to be significantly bigger than BA.5?

Fauci said that most people think that BA.5 will become the dominant variant and that they will wind up being a substantial proportion.

These variants are different from BA.4 and BA.5, but they’re descended from those viruses, the result of genetic drift. So they share many parts of their genomes with that virus.

If people decided to just get the vaccine, it would escape the protection that they would get from BA.5.

The bivalent boosters currently used in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere target both the ‘ancestral’ SARS-CoV-2 strain circulating at the start of the pandemic and an Omicron strain. CDC data shared at the advisory meeting show that people aged 5 and above who received just a single-strain booster are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who get a bivalent booster. There is still a reduction in the chances of death from COVID-19.

According to the CDC, less than one in seven eligible people have gotten one since it was authorized in the fall.

“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. The Omicron wave of January did not reach heights of this winter’s surge.

An Immunity Target Market for Epidemics: How to Incentivize Vaccines in the Era of the Biden Era

The genetic changes these variants share appear to help them escape the immunity created by vaccines and past infections – a recipe for reinfections and breakthrough infections, particularly for people who haven’t had an updated booster.

But antibody therapies are particularly important for people with immune function that has been blunted 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 get a product into the market even if we had the money today.

An adequate, publicly subsidized market is a key first step. This will enable a coordinated global strategy with the support of G20 governments to drive the research, development and flexible small-scale manufacturing needed to produce vaccines to prevent epidemics, even if, as we hope, they will not be needed.

He says current realities require that the government continue to incentivize the production of new therapies, and he expects that the Biden administration will again try to ask Congress to pass more funding to do that.

Why did COVID-19 restrictions last year and what do we actually know about respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza (genoviruses)?

The spread of respiratory illnesses was blunted by the restrictions. Influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — a seasonal virus that usually causes mild cold-like symptoms, but that can be dangerous for young children and older adults — all but disappeared in 2020 and early 2021. The United States has seen a higher hospitalization rate for flu than it has since 2010, with the surging ofRSV in the Northern Hemisphere. Why exactly are these surges happening now? And what’s in store for future winters?

Every couple of months there is an announcement about new Covid-19 vaccine availability or eligibility, and what once was an annual push to get people vaccinations at the start of each flu season has now become near-constant messaging about vaccines.

The population is naive, according to Hensley, which is why they are more immunologically naive. Children are usually infectious by their second birthday. Now, “you’re going to end up having kids that are three, four years of age right now who have never seen RSV”.

When most of us got reprogrammed in January this year, I was a bit disappointed because we were up to date with vaccinations and wore masks in high-risk settings. But reinfection is the norm for many and we’ve recovered this second time around. While I still experience a chronic cough and postnasal drip, it’s been a nuisance more than anything else.

There is more researchers do not understand about seasonal viruses. For example, COVID-19 restrictions seemed to have little impact on one type of seasonal virus, rhinoviruses — which are the most common cause of colds — for reasons that aren’t entirely understood. Miller says that might be because of their hardy people. They’re less prone to desiccation and can persist for longer in the environment.

There are a lot of questions about how the viruses compete and interfere with one another. It is possible to prevent the introduction of another virus with a strong innate immune response. Hensley points out that last year’s first wave of influenza declined soon after the Omicron surge began. Omicron might have been able to provide short-lived protection against flu. The Omicron surge may have tricked people to hide and keep their distance.

Why do we live in the present stage of COVID epidemic? Why don’t we worry about the future? A comment by M.C. Cowling

Pitzer thinks that next year’s peaks and valleys will be similar to the ones prior to the pandemic. She isn’t placing any bets. But she says: “I do expect that this winter is probably going to be the last unusual winter.”

The data from 20,000 COVID cases was analyzed by Cowling and his team. They found that two vaccines could provide high levels of protection against severe disease for people under 60. Two doses of the vaccine by Pfizer gave 95 to 97% protection and two of the vaccine by CoronaVac offered between 89 and 94 efficacy, according to the team in the Lancet infectious disease this past October.

One answer is that we prefer not to see a baseline of many hundreds of deaths each day as a sort of background noise or faded wallpaper. We don’t have to understand who is dying or why, but we do want to be careful since it is the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.

The Politics of Covid-19 Vaccine Perception in the Western World: Evidence-Based Techniques and Campaigns for Implications for Health Care Workers

There is also a clear political component to vaccine perception in the Western world. According to a survey conducted in the year of 2021, those who voted Republican are more than twice as likely to have their childrenvaccinated against COVID-19 than those who voted Democratic. For some people, at least, vaccine acceptance is deeply intertwined with political identity. The correlation between vaccine hesitancy and politics in Europe was found in an analysis.

Numerous studies have found that flu and Covid-19 vaccines significantly reduce the risk of severe outcomes for those who become infected, including hospitalization and death – thus reducing the burden on the health care work force.

Several researchers are working on evidence-based tools that can help families make more informed vaccine decisions. Salmon and his colleagues developed a tool called Let’s Talk Covid Vaccines which is online and delivers tailored information based on a user’s concerns. Let’s Talk Shots is set to launch within weeks. Omer’s team has also devised a training strategy to help health-care workers to bolster COVID-19 vaccine uptake based on similar principles of targeted messaging, and he says that the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF is now adapting the team’s approach for international use. These are techniques derived from motivational interviews and experiments on how to correct misinformation, he says.

If you factor in the cases of long Covid that vaccines likely prevented, the savings may be much higher, according to Alison Galvani, one of the study authors.

The Yale Center for infectious disease modeling and analysis has said that it is a success given the emergency of the highly transmissible variant Omicron.

“Don’t wait. If you wait, you will risk your health, said Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser at a Friday event. “We’re entering the colder months of the late fall and the early winter. We will be spending the holidays with our families and friends. It’s great if you’re up to date. If you are not getting the vaccine, then you should.

Seven Years of Covid-19: Vaccination Failures as Rich Countries Don’t Know How to Prevent and Defend Ebola in Low and Middle Income Countries

The CDC recommends masking for anyone who’s on public transportation. It suggests wearing it in high Covid-19 community settings. People who are at a high risk of serious illness are encouraged to wear masks even in places with a medium level of population.

With effective, available vaccines against devastating diseases, governments could prevent escalation through contact tracing and ring vaccination: in the case of Ebola, perhaps a few dozen contacts of each infected person could be vaccinated. But producing the small number of doses needed to prevent spread is not profitable for drug companies, and donor governments are reluctant to waste money on preventive vaccines that might never get used.

I warned about this problem seven years ago in a column in Nature (S. Berkley Nature 519, 263; 2015). Despite the wake-up call, this is still a major chink in our pandemic-preparedness armour.

Lower-income nations need to double up their vaccination efforts because of a new variant. CovaX is a global collaboration that delivers vaccines equitably. They failed as wealthy countries prioritized their own populations. Too often, vaccines for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) were delivered intermittently and close to their end of life date, which makes it hard to deliver them in places with limited health-care infrastructure.

Maybe, just maybe, both the failures and the small successes we’ve seen in the midst of Covid-19 can lead us to a space where even more public health innovation can occur.

Wealthy nations should lead the way. They should ensure that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is based in Oslo, and the International AIDS vaccine Initiative, which is in New York City, are funded to do this work as they will involve close collaboration with government research agencies.

Public health leaders say it is difficult to get people to get a flu vaccine because they are tired of hearing about shots.

“There’s a great deal of vaccine fatigue out there. Asking people this year to get not just one vaccine but to get the annual influenza vaccine, as well as the Covid booster, has really been what I have called a hard sell,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Do we live in an era of unfamiliarity? The case for a novel pandemic, with vaccines for humans as a possible alternative

“There’s the old saying, ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ It appears that familiarity does breed a certain nonchalance, but it may be a bit strong.

Federal discussions of a mass poultry-voucher program and the rapid production of existing bird flu vaccines for humans can be seen as encouraging signs. But each of these projects could take at least six months, and almost certainly we would find ourselves wasting the early stage of a new pandemic — and possibly more than that — repeating debates over the last one. You can see the fault lines already, with those who believe the country’s Covid response went too far taking to social media to mock the suggestion that any of the same measures — social distancing, masking, school closures — might be imposed to hold off a new contagion, as though it were irrelevant that this new one might be many times deadlier.

“If it were a vaccine like measles, where it is really effective and it’s not repeated, it might be different,” Hackell said. “But we have to compare it to Covid and flu vaccines, where the efficacy is less than dramatic, and when there’s a lot of controversy going on, I think that spills over.”

“I think there’s fatigue, moral injury, call it burnout on the part of providers as well. We’re not pushing it as hard,” said Hackell, who is also chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Practice and Ambulatory Medicine. It’s hard to keep having these conversations. When your office is full of sick kids, the time is right for these long discussions.

The co-administration of flu and Covid-19 vaccines for the elderly is uptick in China, according to CDC spokesperson Liane Tan

There’s no evidence that linking the two is the best way to boost coverage rates.

“We give multiple vaccines to our kids at the same time, but we haven’t typically done that for adults,” said Tan, former liaison to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee for the American Medical Association.

Nevertheless, the initial concerns about the safety, especially for elders, has continued. China’s doctors don’t know if vaccines for the elderly are safe. The government has pushed a lot of these vaccines which has caused some distrust and confusion. I read a lot about the vaccine’s side effects on Chinese social media.

The message might finally be sticking. According to data shared by CNN, co-administration of the flu and Covid-19 vaccine is higher at Walgreens locations this year.

“At least we’ve got the uptick now, as opposed to this continuous decline that we were seeing four weeks ago,” he said. “But while I’m sounding positive, I want to remind us all that we need to be better than we currently are.”

White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha: Tools and Infrastructure for Managing a Season of Epidemics and Diseases

Just when you thought it was safe for a holiday visit with your Auntie Mary and her fragile health, RSV and the flu reared their heads – and now Covid-19 numbers are creeping up again.

Covid-19 hospitalizations have been on the rise since early November, and older people are bearing the brunt of these serious illnesses. Hospitalization rates are four times higher for seniors than for any other age group.

In the first week of December, the US had the most Covid-19-related deaths in months. The CDC reported more than 3000 deaths for the week, even with vaccines and treatments available.

“We have the tools, we have the infrastructure, and we have the know-how to manage this moment,” White House Covid-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said at a briefing.

The Biden administration has been in daily contact with state and local public health leaders, monitoring hospital levels, he said. The federal government has medical supplies and other resources ready if states need them.

More than 200 Covid-19 tests have received emergency use authorizations because of the flexibility provided to the FDA by a public health emergency declaration in early 2020.

Jha said on CNN on Thursday that people who test positive for Covid-19 should “be evaluated for treatment,” especially those 50 and older and anyone with chronic conditions.

“We want to encourage people to use those tools, and given how widespread and how available those tools are, I think if people did that, we could get through” the Covid-19 season, Jha said.

The Rise and Fall of At-Home Testing for Covid-19 in the U.S. During the Early 2021 Emergency Preparedness Era

In Philadelphia, when schoolchildren come back from the winter break, they will be required to wear masks for 10 days as a “proactive measure” to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses, a district spokesperson said.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Megan Ranney is the deputy dean at the School of Public Health at Brown University and a professor of emergency medicine at the university’s Warren Alpert Medical School. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.

My family was first infected with Covid-19 in April 2020 — a daunting and frightening experience at a time when casualties from the pandemic were mounting in New York City and no vaccine or effective treatment was in sight.

The first under appreciated fact is that frequent, easily accessible antigen testing for all is a key part of Covid-19 mitigatement and rapid at home testing for Covid-19 is now available to all of us. Performing an at-home test before you go to a holiday party, a few days after you’ve been exposed to the virus or when you’re feeling ill reduces the chance of unintentional virus spread.

It may be tough to remember now, but it wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that at-home testing even became available to the public. They were difficult to find at the time. Not surprisingly, huge disparities in use were observed in those early months. The elderly and low-income people were less likely to use them.

Insurers, including Medicare, reimburse consumers for up to eight tests per month per person. The ICATT, or the Increasing Community Access To Testing program was developed to provide free community testing at more than 15,000 sites (including pharmacies, libraries, and grocery stores) across the United States. According to one government official, more than 50% of tests performed through this program are for uninsured individuals. Food banks, schools, federally qualified health centers and low-income senior housing have similar programs put in place.

Vaccines For Children: The Uphill Battle Against COVID-19 and Other Upcoming Challenges for Health Care in the 21st Century

Better yet, just last week, a new partnership was announced between Walgreens, Uber Health and DoorDash to facilitate the timely delivery of Paxlovid to those who cannot get to the pharmacy. Walgreens claims that it can reach 92 percent of Americans. If this new partnership is combined with the existing ones fromCVS andRITEAID, it could reduce the chances that someone sick will have to expose others to get a Paxlovid prescription. It also provides immense benefit to those who can’t get transportation or child care or are disabled.

As an emergency physician and a mom, I’d love all Americans to be able to access at-home testing – and treatment – for a greater variety of common illnesses, such as the flu, RSV and strep throat. For now, the FDA’s speedy approval of new diagnostics is only possible for tests and pharmaceuticals related to Covid-19.

We have developments to celebrate at the same time. We now have some amazing new tools that can help with diseases and illness, and are available to everyone.

Two studies from Friday by the CDC show the effectiveness of the vaccine against COVID-related emergency department visits and hospitalizations among older people.

In September, the senior vice president and director of global health and HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation told NPR they think it’s going to be an uphill battle. “I do think it’s a tough sell just because of where we are on this point in the pandemic.”

There are clear risks of allowing the infections to flourish. Zimbabwe is currently working to contain a huge measles outbreak that claimed the lives of more than 750 children between April and October. The United States is currently experiencing an outbreak of polio, and New York has declared a state of emergency.

Better data will also be crucial to helping the health-care community to quickly identify places where intervention is needed to prevent immunization levels from dipping too low. O’Brien says that the WHO has been working with member nations to adopt the agency’s district health information system, called DHIS2, which makes it easier to share granular within-country information about vaccine administration and coverage. She says catching the zero-dose children will be a real challenge, because they live under the poverty line in settlements with insufficient housing and basic services, rural villages and conflict zones. She says that they’re uncounted and unseen, even though they are born outside of a facility. “It’s really hard to plan to go out and vaccinate children who you don’t even know exist.” One of the goals of the Immunization Agenda 2030 is to reduce the number of zero-dose children by half, which the WHO estimates could save as many as 50 million lives over the next 10 years.

The surge in death and infection are giving way to a constant loss as well as debilitation due to long COVID. A focus on COVID-19 has also affected the fights against AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Although precise counts are difficult to obtain, overall death rates in many countries remain higher than before COVID-19 hit.

The vaccine campaigns for children in resource- limited settings were put on hold because of the Pandemic. According to the WHO, over half of the vaccine campaigns were either canceled or delayed by May 2020.

The extent to which concerns about COVID-19 shots are fuelling hesitancy around other vaccines remains unclear. But some who study vaccine uptake are already concerned. Salmon says he would expect to see a drop in vaccine use in populations that have been unwilling to get the vaccine. Early indications are that pregnant people in the US may be less willing to get the tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis vaccine. He is concerned that this is just the tip of a much bigger puzzle, which he fears will be broken soon.

There is the possibility that this mistrust will spread around the world. There is a globally coordinated, very deep, negative network out there that is exploiting the Pandemic Era to spread and promote a broader anti-vaccine agenda through social networks. The vaccine hesitancy in South Africa is spread mainly in more affluent communities that lack the time and resources to research on the internet. The TikTok platform is dangerous, she says. A lot of these things are happening there. In poorer communities without easy Internet access, the conversation is just as readily driven by radio broadcasts, religious leaders or poster campaigns, Omer says.

There were optimistic proclamations, too. In January, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declared that SARS‑CoV-2 no longer poses a threat to society. In September, US President Joe Biden remarked during an interview that the pandemic was over. The director-general of the World Health Organization is hopeful that the global emergency designation will end in three years.

Most people in China are immunologically unprepared for Omicron, the dominant strain now in circulation. They have had no exposure to any SARS-CoV-2 variant and, if vaccinated, have received vaccines only against the virus’s original strain. China is likely to find out how other countries with limited exposure found the same thing: there won’t be a wave of people leaving when the restrictions are lifted. It’s possible that new versions of the same bug will arise in the population or be imported when the country opens its borders to visitors.

There is a path to renewal of vaccinations that lies with technology. Development of mucosal vaccines is under way. It is hoped that they will cause sterilizing immunity that will block transmission of many illnesses, not just severe illness. China has approved an inhalable booster dose and a nasal vaccine, and India a two-dose nasal-drop primary vaccine. Iran and Russia have both approved the vaccine. But researchers are awaiting data to check whether any of these deliver on their promise of stopping SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s important that people at high risk understand the importance of getting vaccinations and that they stay up to date on their boosters.”

Now, the public health approach is changing. The CDC is going to put a number of single-doses in long-term care facilities that have the right storage equipment. Even if a resident of the facility is ready for a booster, a single dose of vaccine from the pharmacy can be obtained by the staff at the nursing home.

With the winter holidays upon us and people gathering with loved ones, Sandra Lindsay says to think about Grandma. Lindsay was the first person in the U.S. to receive a vaccine when she worked as a critical care nurse at Northwell Health in New York. “We all have a responsibility to our loved ones,” she says. “If you are sick, stay home. Grandma — take her to get vaccinated as a Christmas gift.”

Baur has worked with community health workers who are out in Maryland pounding the pavement, talking to people about vaccination, and it’s slow going. Baur doesn’t think that anyone has found a message that is changing hearts and minds.

“Providers are still the number one source for vaccine recommendations,” she says. It’s opening the door to a discussion and the likelihood that people might think more carefully about it if providers are recommending vaccines.

There are a lot of ways to combat vaccine hesitancy, including focusing on misinformation or politicization or trust in public health. “I decided to take an angle that’s a little bit different, which is to look at how to improve the vaccination experience,” says Moore of Immunize.org.

She says that the Autism Society for America has been introducing new ways to help families and kids get vaccine since it can be very traumatic for people with a neurological condition. They have some simple, low-cost ideas like putting on headphones, listening to your favorite music, or using a little plastic “shot blocker” to make the shot hurt less.

When my daughter, Noa, was 7 I tried a variation of this to get her the booster. (Fear of needles among kids is even higher than among adults — more like 2 in 3.) I cut the lidocaine patch I bought at the store to fit her bicep, because it was a pain in her back. I stuck it on her upper arm about 30 minutes before we left. Then I drew an outline on her skin around the patch, so the immunizer could give her the shot in that area. Noa said that the shot didn’t hurt, and she was proud she hadn’t cried. She asked if it would be possible to use it for every shot over the next few years.

Can the Chinese Vaccines Against Severe Disease be Safe and Effective in the Age of Populations in the World? The Case of Sinovac-CoronaVac and its Implications for Elders

There’s a concern that the COVID in China could create new variations, but they can occur anywhere in the world as COVID continues to circulate.

The data show that the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines is good, and it’s time to look at that data in order to understand what will happen in China over the next few months.

The Chinese vaccines are not “mRNA vaccines,” like the ones Pfizer and Moderna manufacture. Instead both CoronaVac and Sinopharm use an older, but well-proven, technology: they contain an inactivated – or killed – form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

But – and this is key – in a study by Cowling and his team, the Chinese vaccines offered just as much protection against severe disease as the mRNA vaccines for adults under age 60.

For older adults, the Pfizer vaccine proved significantly more effective after only two doses. Specifically, the Pfizer vaccine offered about 87-to-92% protection for this group while CoronaVac offered only 64-to-75% protection. But, Cowling points out, an extra booster – or third dose – of CoronaVac lifts the protection to about 98%, the same protection observed with three doses of Pfizer.

Cowling thinks the misinformation about CoronaVac or Sinopharm may stem from early data, looking at the vaccines effectiveness against infection (not severe disease).

All vaccines were very ineffectual against infections, even after three to four months after they were injected, due to the emergence of the immune-evading variants.

That exclusion from both the trials and vaccination campaigns has led to the relatively low vaccination rate among elders in China. “And it has also led to concerns about whether the vaccines were safe and effective among the elders,” Bouey explains.

In the past year, CoronaVac and Sinopharm have been tested in 12 international studies including one in Turkey with over 12,000 participants, one in Brazil with over 3 million participants and one in Chile with more than 10 million vaccinations. About 12,000 people were immunized for CoronaVac in one study examined its safety. There were 67 serious adverse events and all of them were unrelated to the vaccine. Given these results, “the data available to date indicate that Sinovac-CoronaVac is generally well tolerated and consistent with the safety profile of other licensed, alum-adjuvanted inactivated vaccines,” WHO wrote in May 2021.

US regulators first authorized Paxlovid in December 2021, and have since loosened restrictions on who can prescribe it in an effort to make it more broadly available. The drug hasn’t been used to the extent health officials expected, despite delivery of 10 million Paxlovid courses to the United States.

This underuse stems in part from misinformation and misconceptions about the drug, says Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease physician at Columbia University in New York City.

But researchers have found that rebound often occurs even in people who don’t take Paxlovid3. Precise estimates for rebound incidence vary, depending on the population studied and the definition of ‘rebound’. But regardless of whether people take Paxlovid, Smith says, it’s common for them to experience either viral rebound — in which people test positive again — or symptom rebound, but not both at the same time4. Smith says that symptom rebound tends to be very mild, and is still far preferable to hospitalization or death.

In addition, Paxlovid can’t be taken with many other drugs and, in some people, makes certain foods taste bitter or metallic, both of which reinforce the perception that it’s toxic, Smith says. Treatment requires taking several pills twice a day for five consecutive days — which isn’t the easiest regimen to adhere to, Smith adds.

COVID-19 vaccination plan: The Vanderbilt team’s goal was to fight the spread of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus

Such concerns have led health officials to point to hesitancy to explain why use of the drug has fallen short. But there are also systemic reasons, says Anne Sosin, a public-health-policy specialist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Scientists are split on a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposal to update COVID-19 vaccines once a year, similar to the agency’s approach to updating influenza vaccines. At a meeting of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel on 26 January, some researchers argued that the plan would help to simplify the country’s complex COVID-19 immunization schedule and might boost uptake as a result.

Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, stated that administering the jab before the winter surge could prevent a rush of hospitalizations. In winter, clinics are swamped with people infected with influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which led to some US hospitals nearing capacity this season.

The bivalent vaccine would probably become the main product for people that haven’t had a primary series if the vaccine composition is changed.

When the Covid-19 respiratory disease was first discovered in North America in March of 2020, researchers from the University of Tennessee tracked down some patients and asked them for blood samples.

Doctors shipped vials of the blood to Nashville, where the Vanderbilt team got to work analyzing it for proteins called antibodies, which the immune system generates when it’s exposed to a virus or other foreign substance. In particular, the Vanderbilt team was looking for neutralizing antibodies—those capable of binding to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and preventing it from entering cells and causing infection.

The data was being looked at, says the associate director of the Vaccine Center. “We had already mourned the loss of Evusheld and knew it was just a matter of time.” It was intended to fight Covid-19.

There’s a problem with the existing monoclonal antibodies, they bind to a small part of the spike Protein, which is found in the virus. The part has constantly changed giving way to new variations of the same drug that are no longer compatible with current monoclonal antibodies.

The FDA revoked the authorization for bebtelovimab in November of 2022. It said that the drug wouldn’t neutralizing BQ.1 or BQ.1.1, which made up 57 percent of cases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, half of all cases were replaced by XBB. 1.5 as of the beginning of February.

Paxlovid is still useful against XBB. 1.5 and other Omicron lineages because they use a different mechanism to target the virus. Designed to hijack SARS-CoV-2’s replication process, antivirals stop the virus from making copies of itself and multiplying in the body.

The doctor said that they had determined which parts of the virus would cause the body to fight it.

She was able to prepare a modified sequence for the vaccine in a few hours. Moderna had used the code from the N.I.H. to create synthetic messenger RNA, which is the genetic material that holds instructions for how to build spikes in a body’s immune system. Messenger RNA is the backbone of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, and Pfizer’s vaccine, which also uses synthetic mRNA.

Dr. Graham says that she played a key role in the vaccine’s development. He said Kizzmekia had decided that the coronaviruses was the project she wanted to focus on and that preparation had been done for making the vaccine quickly.

By March 2020, Moderna was running the first human trials of its vaccine, and by December 2020 — less than a year after the first deaths in Wuhan were reported — it was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use.

People who do not develop serious illness can be affected by Covid-19 for days. Now, trial data show that an antiviral called ensitrelvir shortens symptoms of mild to moderate COVID-19 by about a day — and is the first drug to make a statistically significant cut in the number of days people test positive for SARS-CoV-2.

The main aim of the ensitrelvir trial was to see if the drug could accelerate recovery. The results showed that the participants who took the 125-milligram ensitrel Vaccines recovered from some of their symptoms as early as 24 hours earlier than the control group.

The participants who took the 125-milligram dose had a negative test for the disease about 29 hours early than those who took a placebo. According to Shionogi, the study was the first to show a statistically significant reduction in the time to a negative test result.

Scientists who did not participate in the study say that it was not specifically designed to investigate the risk of long COVID. The plans didn’t describe any methods for analyzing the long COVID data.

Topol agrees that Shionogi’s data supports their argument that antivirals can be used to protect against long-term Covidien when residual virus is involved.

There is no consensus on how persistentviruses cause long COVID. “It’s entirely possible that the virus has nothing to do with long COVID,” says Edward Mills, a health researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Long COVID might be caused, for example, by the immune response to the virus, he notes.

Why should we give up on long Covid? The problem of funding the vaccines and treatments, and why we need an Operation Warp Speed 2.0

Editor’s Note: Syra Madad, an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator, is the senior director of the systemwide special pathogens program at NYC Health + Hospitals, and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She tweets @syramadad. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. CNN has more opinion.

But the virus that causes Covid-19 has not disappeared. Based on the CDC’s weekly count, Covid-19 still kills an average of about 327 Americans every day. For comparison, lung cancer causes more than 350 deaths each day in this country — the highest number of deaths for all types of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. There are still massive efforts made to educate the public on lung cancer prevention, screening and treatment. As well as looking for better treatment, research hasn’t stopped. So why should we accept anything less for Covid-19?

There is still a risk for long Covid, which is an umbrella term for a huge amount of new, returning, and ongoing health problems that people experience after being sick with a disease. While it’s still hard to gauge how many people go on to experience long Covid, a 2022 survey by the US Census Bureau found that around 16 million working-age Americans (ages 18 to 65) have long Covid, and of those, 2 to 4 million are out of work as a result.

The last Congress did not fund next-generation Covid-19 vaccines or treatment and it seems unlikely that our current Congress will do so either. But we are in desperate need of an Operation Warp Speed 2.0 as we continue to experience the evolution of this virus, which has been chipping away at the protective wall of immunity we’ve built over the last few years. To stop funding now would be foolish.