Why a fourth shot is — or isn’t — necessary

At this point, one thing about the pandemic is clear: The COVID-19 vaccines, even when followed by a booster, aren’t going to stop the coronavirus — or provide long-term protection from infections.

Right after the third shot — the booster — antibodies rise up quickly. But then about a month later, they begin to decline. As a result, protection against infection drops down to about 50% three months later.

So the question is: Should you get a fourth dose to beef up protection again?

A preliminary study from Israel, published last Tuesday, suggests that for the general population, the answer is likely no. A fourth shot of the same vaccine — in this case Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna — offered very little extra protection against infection compared with only three shots.

“Not a third dose, not a fourth dose, not a fifth dose will do anything to stop infections [long term],” says Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, an infectious disease specialist at Sheba Medical Center in Tel HaShomer, Israel, and lead author of the new study.

Read more at NPR.

With every twist and turn of the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists, governments, policymakers and researchers have increasingly used the term ‘vaccine hesitancy’ to account for why so many people remain unvaccinated even in nations where supplies are plentiful. The share of papers with ‘vaccine’ or ‘vaccination’ in the title that also mention ‘hesitancy’ rose from 3.3% in 2019 to 8.3% in 2021 (see ‘The power of words’), according to a Web of Science search.

The most striking lesson from the pandemic is that preoccupation with vaccine hesitancy — whatever that term might mean to different people — centres too much of the responsibility for the success (or not) of a vaccination programme on individuals.

It is mainly governments that have the power to make vaccines both accessible and acceptable. Before the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, a survey indicated that people living in Chile were more reluctant to get vaccinated than were those in other Latin American countries¹. Yet more than 89% of Chile’s population has been fully vaccinated, as defined by that nation. And an early analysis indicates that this is largely thanks to vaccination being prioritized politically². In a pre-pandemic example, Australia’s federal government started to introduce various improvements to childhood immunization programmes in 1997, including financial incentives for parents and doctors. Childhood vaccination rates rose from around 84% to 94% within three years³³.

Read more at Nature.

Veteran Fox Business host Neil Cavuto’s extended, unexplained absence from the network over the past five weeks has raised questions for many viewers — some wondered whether something sinister was afoot, others feared he had suddenly died.

Upon returning to his show Cavuto: Coast to Coast on Monday, the anchor said the latter guess was nearly correct: A second bout of COVID-19 landed him in the intensive care unit, where he said things were “touch and go” for some time.

Cavuto, who has multiple sclerosis and survived stage 4 cancer and open-heart surgery, counted himself among the roughly 3% of Americans who has a weakened immune system and “cannot sustain the full benefits” of the COVID-19 vaccine. But he said some defense was better than no defense.

“Let me be clear,” he told viewers. “Doctors say had I not been vaccinated at all, I wouldn’t be here.”

Read more at NPR.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider requiring that government-imposed Covid-19 vaccine mandates include religious exemptions, turning away an appeal by a group of Maine health-care workers.

The justices left intact a federal appeals court decision letting Maine fully enforce its shot requirement for workers in licensed health-care facilities. Maine is one of three states, along with New York and Rhode Island, that require vaccination of health-care workers and allow exemptions only for medical reasons.

Although the Supreme Court has limited the federal government’s power to require Covid shots or tests, the justices have allowed state and local mandates, even without religious exemptions. The court left in force New York’s requirement in December.

The Supreme Court had already rejected the Maine challengers in October, when over three dissents the justices refused to intervene on an emergency basis.

Read more at Bloomberg News.

Paul Farmer, a Harvard University physician, anthropologist and global public-health leader, spent decades bringing first-rate medical care to people in the poorest corners of the world.

Dr. Farmer, who was 62, died on Monday of a sudden cardiac event while sleeping in his apartment on the campus of a university he had helped to establish in rural Butaro, Rwanda, said Sheila Davis, chief executive officer of the Partners in Health nonprofit he co-founded.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

Chris Crouch had had low expectations for online dating. He was a police officer in his 30s, almost a year out from a painful divorce, and, he said, the women he had met had been “playing games” in ways that left him dispirited.

Then he met her.

Diana Garcia Martinez was 24 and a busy single mom whose sister had set up her profile without her knowing. She was intelligent, empathetic and upfront, and by the third date, he was in love. “It was just a feeling. … I felt like I knew her my whole life,” he recalled explaining to his cousin Gilbert, knowing it was a cliche but also true.

Now, four years later, he was in a hospital intensive care room remembering their courtship as his wife lay unconscious, hooked up to a tangle of machines keeping her alive. Diana was 20 weeks pregnant, and he had a decision to make.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Moderna is set to expand its pipeline of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)-based products with three new development programmes.

The programmes comprise mRNA vaccine candidates against varicella-zoster virus (VSV) to lower the rate of shingles, herpes simplex virus (HSV) and a new checkpoint cancer vaccine. 

The latest development builds on the company’s experience with its Covid-19 vaccine, Spikevax. 

Currently, the company has five vaccine candidates in the developmental stage for latent viruses such as cytomegalovirus (CMV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), HSV and VZV.

Read more at Pharmaceutical Technology.

They’ve wrestled with child-care crises. They’ve missed work and paychecks. Some have even changed careers when day-care closures forced them to work remotely.

Parents of children younger than 5 say they feel forgotten and left behind, watching others reclaim normalcy while they stay home with kids who are too young to be vaccinated and have to quarantine when there is an exposure to the coronavirus at day care or school.

“The rest of the world has moved on, and they are not able to do so safely,” said Jennifer Shu, a pediatrician and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Parents are now dealing with another twist in a two-year roller-coaster ride after a coronavirus vaccine for the youngest children was further delayed this month. The Food and Drug Administration said it would wait to make a decision on authorizing the vaccine until data on a third dose becomes available — opening up a host of new questions and concerns.

Read more at The Washington Post.

When the recent COVID-19 wave fueled by the omicron variant hit the U.S., no one expected it would lead to the number of deaths it did.

As of Wednesday, the nation is reporting 2,200 new COVID daily deaths on average. While this is lower than the 3,400-peak seen last winter, it’s still three times higher than the number of average fatalities recorded two months ago.MORE: COVID hospitalizations and deaths surge in Los Angeles County

Additionally, last winter, vaccines had only just started to roll out, children were not yet eligible and the conversation surrounding boosters was far off.

With around 60% of Americans fully vaccinated during the most recent wave, daily deaths from omicron are still relatively high, which begs the question: Who is dying of COVID-19 when there is such strong vaccination coverage?

Infectious disease doctors say it is still mainly unvaccinated people, most of whom are in their 30s and 40s with no underlying health issues, who are dying.

Read more at ABC News.

As people across the world grapple with the prospect of living with the coronavirus for the foreseeable future, one question looms large: How soon before they need yet another shot?

Not for many months, and perhaps not for years, according to a flurry of new studies.

Three doses of a Covid vaccine — or even just two — are enough to protect most people from serious illness and death for a long time, the studies suggest.

“We’re starting to see now diminishing returns on the number of additional doses,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. Although people over 65 or at high risk of illness may benefit from a fourth vaccine dose, it may be unnecessary for most people, he added.

Federal health officials have said they are not planning to recommend fourth doses anytime soon.

Read more at The New York Times.