Polio is a dinosaur of a disease, with suspected cases dating back to prehistoric Egypt. For a portion of the 20th century, the paralysis it sometimes caused represented one of the greatest public health threats to American life. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’s had polio — the last time a case originated in the United States was 1979.

For this, you can thank one of America’s longest-running vaccine campaigns. In the 70 years we’ve been vaccinating against polio (also known as poliomyelitis), cases worldwide have been reduced by more than 99.9%. There’s a real possibility that polio could be eradicated entirely within our lifetime. Of the three viruses that cause polio (known simply as Types 1-3), only Type 1 remains. Types 2 and 3 were declared eradicated in September 2015 and October 2019, respectively.

When the polio vaccine was first made available in the U.S. in 1955, the country had never undertaken a nationwide vaccine campaign before. That we even have a standardized vaccine schedule for children today is the direct result of both that campaign and the smaller (or, smallpox-er) ones that came before it.

Read more at Fatherly.

IN THE 14 months that Covid vaccines have been available, it has felt like they’ve dominated all conversations. What’s in them? How can we get them? Who doesn’t want to get them? And—of most relevance right now—when will the youngest children, the last cohort to become eligible, finally be able to receive them?

In that chatter, it’s been easy to forget that they’re not the only shot. Kids and adults routinely take an array of other vaccines, and a vast, complex infrastructure delivers them. But as the wave of the 2021 rollout recedes, shrinking from stadiums full of cars to single chairs at pharmacies, we’re seeing what it once obscured. Millions of people missed other crucial vaccines in the first two years—and counting—of the pandemic.

The drop-off had no single cause. Lockdowns, of course—both families and kids stayed home, and medical offices and school clinics closed for their own protection. But also, health care workers who might have handled well-child visits were reassigned to Covid-shot delivery instead. There were protective equipment shortages. Supply chain disruptions. Misinformation and disinformation that increased suspicion of vaccines. Every social factor that dented the pandemic response had a shadow effect on all the other vaccines that needed to be delivered as well.

Read more at Wired.

A California doctor known as a leading purveyor of coronavirus misinformation pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge on Thursday for joining the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol last year.

Dr. Simone Gold, founder of the anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors, entered the plea to a charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds. The conviction carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail.

As part of her guilty plea, Gold acknowledged she and her co-defendant John Strand, while outside the building, were directly in front of a police officer who was assaulted and dragged to the ground. The doctor also acknowledged then entering the building and giving a speech in Statuary Hall about her opposition to coronavirus vaccine mandates and lockdowns imposed by the government, as Strand filmed her comments.

Gold, 56, of Beverly Hills, later told The Washington Post that she followed a crowd into the Capitol, didn’t witness any violence and didn’t think she was breaking any laws.

Read more at NBC 4 Washington.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday said the U.S. stands ready to rapidly deploy new vaccines in the event another Covid variant emerges, while reassuring Americans the U.S. is moving toward normalcy after two years of disruption caused by the virus.

“I cannot promise a new variant won’t come, but I can promise you we’ll do everything within our power to be ready if it does,” Biden said during his first State of the Union speech Tuesday evening. “If necessary, we’ll be able to deploy new vaccines within 100 days instead of many more months or years,” the president said.  

The omicron variant upended the U.S. in December and January, rapidly sweeping the nation and causing an unprecedented surge of infections that pushed many hospitals across the country to the brink. Pfizer and Moderna are both working on vaccines that target omicron.

Read more at CNBC.

A new study, published in the Journal of Community Health, emphasizes the importance of outreach to people who have mixed feelings about getting vaccinated.

The study looked at the attitudes of participants aged 55 years and older about vaccines at different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers accessed data from the COVID-19 Coping Study to identify people in the United States who were either receptive, ambivalent, or against getting vaccinated against the disease.

To date, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that 75% of the adult population is fully vaccinated, having received two doses of an mRNA vaccine or one dose of a single-dose vaccine.

However, though studies indicate that receiving a booster dose reduces severe illness by 92%Trusted Source, the CDC reports that only 47.1% of adults who are fully vaccinated have received at least one of these additional doses.

Read more at Medical News Today.

On some days Marilyn Datillo, a vaccine nurse, used to see 900 people enter Mercy Covid Vaccine Clinic in Kirkwood, a St Louis suburb. Now, she said sometimes fewer than 20 people visit the clinic in one day – even though only 55% of Missouri residents are fully vaccinated and just 22% are boosted.

When someone does show up to get vaccinated, “you celebrate”, Datillo said.

But she and infectious disease doctors do not anticipate many more people suddenly deciding to get their first shot – or ending delays on second shots and boosters – amid declining numbers of Covid cases and hospitalizations in the US; the lifting of vaccine mandates and other restrictions; and some talk of the end of the pandemic being in view.

Read more at The Guardian.

The omicron variant has made one thing clear; SARS-CoV-2 is not done with us. 

To stop this pandemic and mitigate future coronavirus pandemics, we need a pan-coronavirus vaccine to stop all variants in their tracks, and we need to rewrite the rules for how we make and distribute vaccines on a global scale.

This crisis has been the perfect storm. It attacked humanity with stunning success, revealing our public health vulnerabilities. Around the globe, we see healthcare systems under strain, hesitancy to adopt protective measures and worst of all, poor access to vaccines in underserved populations once they were created. Even if we were to vaccinate everyone in the United States today, the virus would find unvaccinated populations in other countries, infect, and quickly mutate, only to return to our shores.

Read more at The Hill.

This week the government announced additional vaccine booster jabs for the over-75s and suggested a further shot is likely to be needed in the autumn. But imagine if the next Covid vaccine jab you have were the last you would ever need. That’s a dream being actively pursued now by researchers, who feel it could be possible to make a “universal” vaccine against the Sars-CoV-2 virus that would work well not only against all existing variants but any that the virus could plausibly mutate into in the future.

Some are thinking even bigger. In January, Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, and two other experts called for more research into “universal coronavirus vaccines” that would work not only against Sars-CoV-2 but against the many other coronaviruses in animal populations that have the potential to spill over into humans and cause future pandemics. “We need a research approach that can characterise the global ‘coronaviral universe’ in multiple species,” Fauci and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine, “and apply this information in developing broadly protective ‘universal’ vaccines against all [coronaviruses].”

Read more at The Guardian.

The same technology used to develop the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines is being tested to prevent HIV.

“The whole idea is very similar to the emergence of COVID vaccines,” said Dr. David Diemert of George Washington University. “It’s to produce antibodies in the person who gets the vaccine that will then interfere with the virus if that person ever comes into contact with the virus and to prevent infection.”

GW is one of four test sites in the country that are vaccinating healthy adults with an experimental HIV vaccine using messenger RNA technology.

Messenger RNA vaccines deliver instructions, training cells to make a protein that primes the immune system, producing antibodies that will protect from infection if the real virus enters the body.

“It really was groundbreaking and it proved that the technology works, it’s safe,” Diemert said.

The technology has been pivotal during the pandemic, and scientists are hopeful it could help end the HIV epidemic, too.

Read more at NBC 4 Washington.

We are witnessing the Great Unmasking, with masks mandates falling faster, even, than plummeting Omicron caseloads. Dozens of states are removing the power to mandate from public health agencies and governors. Forcing people to do something is an extreme measure; opposition to mask, vaccination, and social distancing mandates is understandable. When are mandates justified?

Public health mandates have three distinct roles: increasing availability of accurate information; protecting people from each other; and establishing collective action that benefits society in ways individual actions cannot. Mandates reflect, and, ideally, strengthen understanding that we are connected: individuals affect and are affected by the actions of others.

Public attitudes toward mandates have shifted as understanding of how behavior can harm others has increased — for example, with laws against drunk driving or establishing smoke-free public places. These changes did not require radical changes to society but were a natural evolution as we better understood these threats and the interventions to counter them.

Read more at CNN.