Vaccines were supposed to be a game changer for Covid-19 in schools. Back in the more innocent days of spring 2021, it seemed as though once the shots were approved for children, education could pretty much go back to normal — kids would get vaccinated, infections would drop, quarantines would become unnecessary, and teachers and families alike could settle into a new normal that looked a lot like the old one.

It didn’t happen exactly like that. Right now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone age 5 and older get vaccinated against Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has given the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine full approval for people 16 and older, and emergency use authorization (a form of limited approval that still requires data showing a treatment is safe and effective) for children 5 to 15. However, families have been slow to vaccinate their kids; by early February, just 22 percent of 5- to 11-year-olds were fully vaccinated.

At the same time, the omicron variant has increased transmission, driven up cases, and forced closures of classrooms, schools, and even entire districts due to quarantines, staffing shortages, and labor disputes. The surge now appears to be easing, but it’s still far from normal out there.

Read more at Vox.

Vaccine uptake is fading, but doctors and health care workers are trying to reach the tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans — one conversation at a time.

The big picture: Persuading the remaining unvaccinated takes a lot more time and effort, and health care workers who have found success are not writing off holdouts as anti-vaxxers.

“You do need to meet people and individualize your approach,” said Odilichi Ezenwanne, a primary care physician at the Aaron E. Henry Community Health Services Center in Tunica, Mississippi, where just 50% of the county is fully vaccinated as of Feb. 9.

• “You have to understand their own reasons for restraint or hesitancy … that’s when they really open up to you.”

By the numbers: CDC data shows fewer than 100,000 people are getting their first COVID vaccine dose every day, the lowest daily average since the vaccines were available in late 2020.

Read more at AXIOS.

California would be the first state to impose Covid-19 vaccine mandates at all workplaces under sweeping new legislation to be unveiled Friday.

The bill from Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) comes as Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to release a statewide pandemic exit strategy signaling the transition to an “endemic” phase of the public health crisis.

“The pathway to endemic, for us to get back to some sense of normalcy, is through vaccines,” Wicks told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. Wicks floated a similar proposal last year but didn’t introduce it.

Wicks is acting after the U.S. Supreme Court nullified the Biden administration’s employer vaccine mandate — a decision that, she said, opened the door for state lawmakers to take the lead on the issue.

Assembly Bill 1993, whichwould likely take effect next year and levy penalties on employersthat don’t comply, is likely to draw criticism from mandate foes — especially as infection and hospitalization rates driven by the Omicron variant continue to plummet.

Read more at POLITICO.

Truck drivers protesting vaccine mandates are parking their rigs in the middle of intersections in Canadian cities, blocking traffic and, in some places, bringing daily life and business to a standstill. Their goal is to force federal officials to roll back pandemic restrictions.

How did a handful of people turn a country whose constitution calls for “peace, order and good government” into an unlikely springboard for a budding global movement?

It began on Jan. 22, when convoys of truck drivers departed from British Columbia en route to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, to protest a vaccine mandate — imposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — for truckers entering the country from the United States.

Mr. Trudeau initially dismissed the protesters as a “small fringe minority” — a majority of Canadians say they support public health measures intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus — but the protesters are having an outsize impact. The protests have spread to other cities, including Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary, as well as on the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, a vital link for the automobile industry.

Read more at The New York Times.

More than 10 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have reportedly been administered across 184 countries.

In the United States, more than 543 million doses have been administered so far.

Despite the widespread use of the vaccines, some people with cancer question whether the shots are safe for them.

A group of researchers has published a study on Feb. 7 that may provide some reassurance.

The researchers report that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, such as those manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna, are just as safe for people with cancer as they are for everyone else.

The Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers in Philadelphia tracked short-term side effects from more than 1,700 recipients of the Pfizer vaccine.

They said they found no other reactions for people undergoing active cancer treatment (surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or radiation therapy) or who had completed treatment.

Read more at Healthline.

Austria has become the first Western democracy to require vaccines for nearly all adults. Everyone who isn’t exempt will be required to show proof of vaccination during random checks by the police.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

Austria has become the first Western democracy to require vaccines for nearly all adults. People who are pregnant have medical conditions or have recently recovered from COVID-19 are exempt from the policy, while others will be required to show proof of vaccination during random checks by the police.

Listen at NPR.

Misinformation and access to care could sway a parent’s decision to get their newborn children vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research from Stony Brook University.

Stony Brook researcher Heidi Preis and her team looked at how pregnant mothers’ experiences influenced their decision to give their infants regular vaccinations, like those for measles, mumps and rubella. She said some parents face barriers to vaccination — access to care, health insurance and paid family leave.

“Poverty is related to less of a vaccine uptake in infants, and race and ethnicity, so that minoritized groups are less likely to have their infants vaccinated,” Preis said.

Parents who used telehealth and spent less time in the hospital were less likely to vaccinate their kids. Preis said that’s especially concerning during the pandemic. So is vaccine hesitancy, which could come from social media misinformation.

“And people wrongly think that there’s a lot of risk involved, and don’t understand the importance of having their infants vaccinated in a timely manner,” Preis said.

Read more at WSHU.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to notice twinges of a feeling to which I have become unaccustomed. At first I thought it was indigestion, but I’m beginning to think it is actually cautious optimism. That’s because the recent Omicron surge underscored how well our COVID-19 vaccines are working.

Omicron was first documented in Botswana and South Africa in late November, 2021, and rapidly spread around the world. Yet something was different this time around. Compared with the Delta variant, Omicron infection resulted in notably lower hospitalization and death rates in South Africa and elsewhere.

There has been a rush to declare Omicron “milder” than Delta, and before we spend any time thinking about whether it is, we should remember that this “mild” virus was responsible for more than 15,000 deaths in the U.S. over the last week alone. And a virus this transmissible does collateral damage by infecting healthcare workers who must then isolate.

Having said that, at the peak of Omicron, the U.S. reported about ten times more daily infections than were recorded in the middle of November when Delta was the only variant in town. The Omicron peak however resulted in about twice as many deaths as we saw in the middle of November. It should be clear that were we seeing this many infections with Delta, things would be much, much worse than they are.

Read more at TIME.

Two years ago, when a pair of Houston scientists first began crafting a cheap, easy-to-make COVID-19 vaccine, they had a tough time finding support for it at home in the U.S., a country that rewards expensive, flashy new tech.

They could have used help with their goal of combating the virus both locally and abroad, where it was morphing into more dangerous variants headed for U.S. shores.

But the team at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, led by Drs. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez, worked on their patent-free vaccine with donated money in relative obscurity, failing to garner much outside interest.

Then one thing finally broke through and spoke to the people who had been overlooking their open-science approach to the vaccine known by its first producer as Corbevax. It came without strings or a secret formula, making it a true humanitarian pursuit that could finally reach the unvaccinated corners of the developing world.

“Corbevax to beat inequity?” read a CNN News ticker beside a televised interview with the scientists last month.

Read more at The Texas Tribune.

About a year after wealthier nations began rolling out coronavirus vaccines, more than half the world’s population has been fully vaccinated — a logistical feat without precedent in human history.

But the global rollout remains uneven, with poor countries reporting much lower vaccination rates than rich countries. Public health experts have been warning that vaccine inequity is helping prolong the pandemic, as the focus of those seeking to speed up global vaccine coverage begins to shift from resolving a shortfall of supply to distributing doses and persuading people to get them.

Nearly 54 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to Our World in Data, an information partnership between the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab charity. Nearly 62 percent have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

Read more at The Washington Post.