The world’s most widely used COVID-19 vaccines provide little to no protection against infection with the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, laboratory evidence suggests.

Inactivated-virus vaccines contain SARS-CoV-2 particles that have been chemically treated to make it impossible for them to cause an infection. Stable and relatively easy to manufacture, such vaccines have been distributed widely as part of China’s global vaccine diplomacy, helping them to become the jab of choice in many countries. But a multitude of experiments show that they are consistently hobbled by Omicron.

Many people who receive two jabs of an inactivated vaccine fail to produce immune molecules that can counter Omicron transmission. And even after a third dose of an inactivated vaccine, an individual’s levels of ‘neutralizing’ antibodies, which provide a potent safeguard against viral infection of cells, tend to remain low. A third shot of another type of vaccine, such as those based on messenger RNA or purified proteins, seems to offer better protection against Omicron.

Read more at Nature.

Suspicion, misinformation, complacency and delays because of the holidays and bad weather have combined to produce alarmingly low COVID-19 vaccination rates in U.S. children ages 5 to 11, authorities say.

As of Tuesday, just over 17% were fully vaccinated, more than two months after shots for the age group became available. While Vermont is at 48%, California is just shy of 19% and Mississippi is only at 5%.

Vaccinations among the elementary school set surged after the shots were introduced in the fall, but the numbers have crept up slowly since then, and omicron’s explosive spread appears to have had little effect.

Read more at NBC Today.

If, just a few years ago, someone had written a sci-fi story about a global pandemic in which a significant portion of the population refused to take the vaccine that would save their lives, it would’ve been dismissed as too far-fetched. And yet, here we are, well into that dystopian future.

As of this writing (mid-January 2022), the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has exceeded 800,000, with no sign of the virus abating. Despite the ready availability of effective vaccines, nearly a third of Americans still haven’t gotten inoculated. What accounts for this vaccine hesitancy?

In part, it’s due to “anti-vaxxer” conspiracy theories. False claims, such as the notion that childhood vaccines causing autism, have been rampant on social media. So, if you’ve bought into this misinformation and already have doubts about vaccine safety, it’s understandable why you’d have misgivings about the COVID shot as well.

Read more at Psychology Today.

COVID-19 can strike hard and fast — especially when you are pregnant. Alison Cahill, a specialist in maternal–fetal medicine at the Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, vividly remembers a patient from the first wave of the pandemic who was 26 weeks pregnant and woke up one morning with a cough. Her condition declined so rapidly that she was admitted to hospital that evening. Within six hours, she had been transferred to the intensive-care unit (ICU), where she was sedated so that she could be placed on a heart–lung bypass machine. Owing to safety precautions, her husband had to communicate with the medical team from the parking area.

“When she woke up and started to not feel very well, I don’t think it was within her wildest dreams that by the next morning she would be sedated and by herself in an ICU,” Cahill says. The woman spent a few weeks in the unit before she was finally able to go home.

Health-care professionals were still sharing similar gut-wrenching stories when the Delta variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 hit the United States. Cahill’s hospital, for example, was flooded with so many people who rapidly became ill with COVID-19 that the staff had to convert other floors into extra ICUs. But there was one stark difference: COVID-19 vaccines were now readily available. And all of Cahill’s critically ill pregnant patients had refused one.

Read more at Nature.

Parents today have the option to protect their kids from cancer with just two quick jabs. The HPV vaccine prevents nine different strains of human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can cause a range of different cancers, from cervical to penile. Since the vaccine’s approval in 2006, rates of cervical cancer, the fourth most common cancer in women, have steadily dropped. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all kids between 11 and 12 years of age receive the HPV vaccine — or anyone as old as 26 who is not already vaccinated. But what about the HPV vaccine for adults past their mid-20s? Is there a hard and fast HPV vaccine age limit? Does the HPV vaccine help if you’re already infected?

For most adults, the HPV vaccine won’t have much benefit — but there are exceptions.

Read more at Fatherly.

Early on in the pandemic, many of us hoped that India would help vaccinate the world. India’s pharmaceutical sector, dominated by companies capable of churning out generic medicines in vast quantities, looked like the obvious location for vaccine production at the scale needed to inoculate the developing world.

That hasn’t worked out, partly because the Indian government restricted vaccine exports after the Delta variant emerged here — but also because of the unexpected and early success of the mRNA-based shots from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. These came on the market early and set high standards for efficacy against the original variant of the virus. But they were remarkably ill-suited for production and distribution in the emerging world. They need to be stored at untenably low temperatures, and their novel and unfamiliar production process isn’t easy to replicate.

Given their effectiveness as the mainstay of rich-world vaccination programs, it isn’t surprising that, on the infrequent occasions that the West thinks about vaccines for developing countries, the focus is on how to expand mRNA’s footprint. The emergence of Delta and then the Omicron variant — against which booster mRNA shots seem to work better than many alternatives — has led some to the conclusion that, unless the entire world switches to mRNA, effective global vaccination is impossible. Certainly, that’s what both activists and rich-country policy makers seem to think.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Pope Francis suggested Monday that getting vaccinated against the coronavirus was a “moral obligation” and denounced how people had been swayed by “baseless information” to refuse one of the most effective measures to save lives during the pandemic.

Francis used some of his strongest words yet calling for people to get vaccinated in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, an annual event in which he sets out the Vatican’s foreign policy goals for the year.

Francis, 85, has generally shied away from speaking about vaccination as a “moral obligation,” though his COVID-19 advisors have referred to it as a “moral responsibility.” Rather, Francis has termed vaccination as “an act of love” and that refusing to get inoculated was “suicidal.”

On Monday he went a step further, saying that individuals had a responsibility to care for themselves “and this translates into respect for the health of those around us. Health care is a moral obligation,” he asserted.

Read more at NBC5 Chicago.

January 5, 2022

A leading expert who helped create the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine said Tuesday that giving everyone in the world booster shots multiple times a year is not feasible.

“We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable,” Professor Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and head of the UK’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Tuesday.

Pollard also stressed the “need to target the vulnerable” going forward, rather than administering doses to everyone age 12 and older. More data is needed to ascertain “whether, when and how often those who are vulnerable will need additional doses,” he said.

Pollard also said he thought further evidence was needed before offering a fourth Covid-19 shot to people in the UK, which is currently rolling out third shots to healthy people 18 and older, and at-risk people 16 and older.

Read more at CNN.

January 6, 2022

High-grade vulvar, vaginal and anal precancer rates decreased or stabilized after the introduction of the HPV vaccine, according to findings published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“HPV causes nearly all cervical cancers and a large proportion of vaginal, vulvar, and anal cancers,” Mona Saraiya, MD, MPH, a medical officer and team lead of the CDC’s Division of Cancer Prevention and Control’s Epidemiology and Applied Research Branch, and colleagues wrote.

Vaccine-type HPV infections, anogenital warts, cervical precancers and invasive cervical cancers have decreased in the U.S. since the introduction of the HPV vaccine to girls in 2006 and boys in 2011, they added.

Saraiya and colleagues examined the incidence rates of intraepithelial lesions grade 3 vulvar, vaginal and anal precancers among individuals aged 15 to 39 years. Using 2000 to 2017 data from select cancer registries, the data covered 27.8% of the U.S. population that required reporting of these precancers.

Read more at Healio.