The nation’s capital will once again be awash in the aura of an electrifying Kennedy this weekend.

But this is no Camelot.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a prince of disinformation in the anti-vaccination kingdom — is marching on Washington with thousands of largely maskless followers this Sunday.

The Kennedys — despite my pestering — aren’t talking about it. At least, not to me.

“I love my uncle Bobby,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s niece, Kerry Meltzer, a doctor, wrote in an opinion piece about her uncle’s celebrity status in the murky world of anti-vaccine science. “But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.”

His membership in the exclusive “Disinformation Dozen,” the biggest spreaders of covid-19 hoaxes and mistruths by researchers who studied social media, has made him a pariah in the Washington circles his family members dominated.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Efforts to curtail the spread of COVID-19 now center on vaccinating against the coronavirus, but the drive has led to heated debates in schools and districts nationwide.

Rupali Limaye, a social and behavioral scientist and health communication scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on Wednesday will release a free series on how educators can train leaders, teachers and parents to become “vaccine ambassadors” to communicate better with parents and community members who have concerns about vaccinating children. Education Week spoke with Limaye about schools’ role in vaccinating students and staff.

Read more at Education Week.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday said he hopes the Food and Drug Administration approves Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine for children under 5 years old in the next month.

“My hope is that it’s going to be within the next month or so and not much later than that, but I can’t guarantee that,” Fauci said during an interview with Blue Star Families, a nonprofit group that supports military families. “I can’t out guess the FDA. I’m going to have to leave that to them.”

Fauci said younger children will likely need three doses, because two shots did not induce an adequate immune response in 2- to 4-year-olds in Pfizer’s clinical trials.

Pfizer plans to submit data to the Food and Drug Administration in the first half of 2022 if the three-dose study proves successful, the company announced in December. Pfizer said it did not identify any safety concerns with the 3-microgram vaccine doses in children 6 months to 4 years old. Adults receive two doses of 30 micrograms apiece as part of their primary series of shots.

He later sent CNBC a statement clarifying that he’s not involved in the decision making process at the FDA and didn’t know when the agency will clear the shots.

Read more at CNBC News.

The world now has a new COVID-19 vaccine in its arsenal, and at a fraction of the cost per dose.

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen over 314 million infections and over 5.5 million deaths worldwide. Approximately 60% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. But there is still a glaring and alarming gap in global access to these vaccines. As a virologist who has followed this pandemic closely, I contend that this vaccine inequity should be of grave concern to everyone.

If the world has learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that viruses do not need a passport. And yet approximately 77% of people in high- and upper-middle-income countries have received at least one dose of the vaccine – and only 10% in low-income countries. Wealthy countries are giving boosters, and even fourth doses, while first and second doses are not available to many worldwide.

But there is hope that a new vaccine called CORBEVAX will help close this vaccination gap.

Read more at The Conversation.

Moderna is poised to commercialize its COVID-19 and influenza combination vaccine by the fall of 2023, with some potential for the same drug to also be viable against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). 

Speaking at the World Economic Forum today, Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel hopes to develop a single annual booster dose to eliminate the need for people to get two to three jabs every time the winter season nears. Bancel did not give any details on the timeline of the vaccine’s release other than predicting that they might do so next year. 

The COVID-19 booster shot is currently being evaluated in several Phase III studies, while its efficacy and safety as a treatment for flu is still being developed and could progress to Phase III trials in the following months. In September last year, Moderna had also hinted at the possibility of using the same shot for RSV and other similar respiratory diseases.

Read more at BioSpace.

Early data out of Israel suggests that a fourth dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna coronavirus vaccine can bring an increase in antibodies — more than what’s been seen after a third dose — but it still might not be enough to protect against breakthrough infections caused by the Omicron variant.

“These are very preliminary results. This is before any publication, but we’re giving it out since we understand the urgency of the public to get any information possible about the fourth dose,” Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the Infection Prevention and Control Unit at Sheba Medical Center, told reporters during a virtual news conference Monday about the data.

“We have a follow-up of the Pfizer vaccine for two weeks now, and we have a follow-up of the Moderna vaccine just for one week at this time point. And what we see is that the Pfizer vaccine, after two weeks, you see an enhancement or increase in the number of antibodies and neutralizing antibodies — a pretty nice increase. It’s even a little bit higher than what we had after the third dose,” Regev-Yochay said. “Yet, this is probably not enough for the Omicron.”

Read more at CNN.

Politicians rarely set out to piss off their constituents, much less admit to doing so. So when French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his desire to antagonize France’s unvaccinated citizens into receiving COVID vaccinations, observers and many of his rivals were appalled, and some were a bit confused. Macron is up for reelection in April, and a quarter of his country remains unimmunized.

But what looked like a risky move for Macron could prove to be a more politically shrewd calculation, not because of whom it alienates, but rather because of whom it doesn’t. In France, and in other democratic countries around the world, the unvaccinated make up a relatively small segment of the population. Macron and his peers in countries such as Australia and Italy have calculated that condemning this group could be more politically effective than pandering to it. Even world-famous celebrities such as tennis star Novak Djokovic, whose unvaccinated status dashed his hopes of defending his Australian Open title, have become the targets of politicians’ ire. By taking a tougher line on the unvaccinated, Macron and other democratically elected leaders facing elections this year may be courting an energetic new voter base: the vaccinated, and ever more impatient, majority.

Read more at The Atlantic.

New research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials in California and New York indicates that a prior case of Covid-19 protected people from infection better than vaccinations did during the delta wave last summer and fall.

The findings, published Wednesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, appear to contradict public health messaging that pushes vaccinations.

But experts maintain that the shots remain the safest way to protect against the most dire consequences of Covid. Even during the height of the delta wave last summer, virtually all hospitalized Covid patients were unvaccinated.

“Vaccines continue to reduce a person’s risk of contracting the virus that causes Covid-19 and are highly effective at preventing severe illness,” Benjamin Silk, one of the study’s authors and an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the CDC, said during a call with reporters Wednesday.

The new research is based on analyses of Covid infections among more than 1.1 million adults in California and New York from May to November last year.

Read more at NBC News.

Americans’ opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines are largely wrong.

We persist in thinking they should prevent all SARS-CoV-2 infections, but given the biology of the virus and the way our immune systems respond to either infection or vaccination that does not happen. 

As with other vaccines, the goal is to prevent serious and deadly outcomes, not to prevent all cases of transmission and infection.

Read more at USA Today.

Many mild, adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine, such as headaches and fatigue, could be attributed to a negative version of the placebo effect, a group of researchers suggests. 

In a study published today (January 18) in JAMA Network Open, scientists found that, in placebo-controlled COVID-19 clinical trials, 35 percent of placebo recipients reported adverse side effects compared to 46 percent of vaccine recipients after one vaccine dose. After two doses, 32 percent of placebo recipients reported side effects compared to 61 percent of vaccine recipients. For placebo recipients, headache, fatigue, and arm pain were the most common side effects reported.  

The placebo effect typically refers to beneficial effects of a drug that derive from the recipient’s expectations of its effects rather than its biochemistry. The effect can also work in reverse, causing adverse effects comparable to known effects, a phenomenon called the “nocebo” effect.

Read more at The Scientist.