December 16, 2021

Gov. Jared Polis said Thursday that he expects omicron to become the dominant form of COVID-19 in Colorado as he announced that health officials believe they have identified the state’s first case of community transmission of the variant.

Polis said five people in Colorado have been infected with the omicron variant so far. He didn’t provide details on the suspected community transmission case.

State health officials said Thursday that omicron has been detected in wastewater samples taken in Boulder, Aurora and in the southwest Denver metro area. The variant has also been found in a sample or samples taken from the South Adams County Water & Sanitation District.

“Omicron is coming,” Polis said at a news conference at the Aurora Municipal Center.

The governor urged people to get a COVID booster shot to ensure they are protected against the new variant, which was first detected last month in South Africa.

Read more at The Colorado Sun.

December 13, 2021

The first COVID-19 vaccines became available to Coloradans one year ago, on Dec. 14, 2020. The rollout initially focused on those who were most at-risk, like older adults and healthcare workers, and gradually expanded over the next few months to phase in more people.

But even with the vaccine broadly available, not everyone wanted to get it, nor was it easily accessible to all. Barriers to access, as well as a lack of trust in the vaccine, were noted among some communities of color. To build access and trust and to help dispel misinformation, a group of medical leaders created the Colorado Vaccine Equity Task Force.

For more on what the group has accomplished over the course of the year, we spoke with one of its members, Dr. Ozzie Grenardo, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Centura Health.

Read more at KUNC.

December 16, 2021

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday recommended Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines over Johnson & Johnson’s shot for adults, after finding dozens of people developed a rare blood clot condition following vaccination with J&J shots. All of those patients were hospitalized, and nine died.

The CDC has confirmed 54 cases of people developing blood clots and showing low blood platelet levels — a new condition called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, which mostly affects younger women. Of those cases, 36 required treatment in intensive care.

In a statement Thursday evening, the CDC said the U.S. has an abundant supply of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The agency emphasized that people who are unwilling or unable to receive Pfizer and Moderna shots will still have access to the J&J vaccine.

Read more at CNBC News.

December 13, 2021

No one knows for sure where the virus came from. It could have been the murky depths of one of the hundreds of bat caves scattered across China. Carried inside a bat on a nightly sojourn, the virus may have jumped to another wild animal, perhaps one of those sold in the wet markets in the region. It’s also possible SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, slipped out of a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, unbeknownst to the researchers studying bat-borne coronaviruses, who were perhaps unintentionally infected by the very thing they were trying to learn how to defend against. In either case, it had to ride in something. A virus, being just a bundle of genetic material wrapped in a bundle of proteins, needs the machinery of a living thing to reproduce. It’s in the dark caverns of bodies that it continues to shift shape, finding new ways to spread and thrive.

Only as the virus emerges from the shadows of these favored havens does it confront its most formidable foe: the scientists quietly awaiting it. How they responded was less mysterious, and certainly less unpredictable, than the virus they targeted. Their medium was light, and the brightness of scientific truth, which they painstakingly pursued in brilliantly lit research labs and “clean rooms” scrubbed of airborne particles—and produced brilliant results.

Read more at TIME.

December 9, 2021

The risks posed by the new COVID-19 omicron variant and even the story of its origins are up for debate, but vaccines and boosters appear to offer some protection against severe disease. When news emerged that omicron was found spreading across southern Africa, U.S. President Joe Biden’s initial response was fast, firm, and ultimately ineffective at actually getting shots into arms globally.

In addition to calling for Americans to get vaccinated or a booster, the president stated: “I call on the nations gathering next week for the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting to meet the U.S. challenge to waive intellectual property protections for COVID vaccines, so these vaccines can be manufactured globally. I endorsed this position in April; this news today reiterates the importance of moving on this quickly.”

The WTO is unlikely to move on this quickly. The 12th WTO Ministerial Conference, which would have addressed the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights waiver on vaccine patents, was itself postponed because of the omicron variant. This postponement is indefinite. Even if IP protections were somehow waived—which is unlikely given opposition from several governments—it would do little to ease the immediate situation in South Africa.

This is because South Africa is currently awash in vaccine supply. South Africa has more than 16 million doses already on hand. Amid the global outbreak of panic about omicron, South African health policymakers asked Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer to defer vaccine deliveries.

Read more at Foreign Policy.

December 9, 2021

Nearly one year after the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first Covid-19 vaccines, you probably don’t need me to persuade you of their efficacy. At the time of writing, more than 4.28 billion people have been given at least one dose, which is around 55.8% of the global population.

Despite this enormous uptake, it’s also likely that you will know at least one person in your family or friendship group who has not yet received the vaccine through personal choice rather than a lack of availability. These people are often characterised as fervent anti-vaxxers who willingly reject science – and we are sometimes told that any attempt to engage in a discussion is simply a waste of breath.

The truth, of course, is more complicated. It’s certainly true that some committed conspiracy theorists are intent on spreading misinformation, but these small-but-highly-vocal groups do not represent the majority of people who have yet to take the vaccine.

Read more at BBC News.

Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant that appears better able to evade immunity, and that seasonal wave could end up a tsunami.

Back in July, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that COVID had become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” an unfortunate turn of phrase that was soon picked up by the president. Now the flaws in its logic are about to be exposed on what could be a terrifying scale. Unvaccinated Americans will certainly pay the steepest price in the months to come, but the risks appear to have grown for everyone. The pandemic of the vaccinated can no longer be denied.

The 60 percent of Americans who are fully vaccinated could soon find their lives looking very different. For much of the summer and fall, those who had received two Pfizer or Moderna doses or one Johnson & Johnson shot were told that they were essentially bulletproof, especially if they were young and healthy. But preliminary data from South Africa and Europe now suggest that two vaccine doses alone might still allow for frequent breakthrough infections and rapid spread of the disease—even if hospitalization and death remain unlikely. Getting three shots, or two shots plus a previous bout of COVID, seems to offer more protection. For Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, that’s enough evidence to justify changing the CDC’s definition of full vaccination. “With Omicron and the data emerging, I think there is no reason why we shouldn’t have a pretty strong push for everyone to have boosters,” he told me.

Read more at The Atlantic.

December 9, 2021

The world has “lost the plot” on equitable vaccine access during the coronavirus pandemic and is falling far short of targets to vaccinate the global south, according to scathing assessments from experts as the omicron variant spreads to more countries.

From the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization [WHO] and several other public health groups have argued the only way out of the pandemic is to vaccinate the entire world.

But McGill University professor in the departments of epidemiology and biostatistics, Madhukar Pai, said the initial response to the omicron variant proved we were a long way from that goal.

“The world has totally lost the plot on this pandemic,” he told NPR.

“Especially after the Delta variant pretty much decimated India, we knew allowing this virus to rip unchecked through populations was a disastrous idea. Because new variants will come [and] mutations will happen if billions of virus particles are manufactured in millions of people.

Read more at NPR.

December 9, 2021

As Covid-19 began spreading in early 2020, one of Linfa Wang’s first ideas was to test the blood of people who’d survived a previous coronavirus outbreak. The virologist, who works out of Duke-NUS Medical School, a collaboration between Duke and the National University of Singapore, has been studying bat-borne viruses for decades. He’d helped show that SARS-CoV-1, which killed almost 800 people in 2003, likely jumped to humans from horseshoe bats. Wang’s new theory was that people who’d recovered from the original SARS might harbor antibodies that could help fight the new one, SARS-CoV-2.

Initially, the experiment was a bust. The patients Wang tested had antibodies only against the older version of SARS. But as a number of Covid variants began spreading early this year, he decided to test the patients again. By this point, many of the Singaporean SARS survivors had also been vaccinated against Covid, providing a rare set of immune systems that had been exposed to proteins from these related coronaviruses.

Read more at Bloomberg News.

December 9, 2021

The United States reached a significant milestone late Wednesday, with more than 200 million people now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus — about 60 percent of the population.

In the past week, an average of 1.92 million doses per day were administered — a 35 percent increase over the week before — according to data from The Washington Post’s tracker.

However, the achievement comes as the nation’s tallies of daily deaths and new cases rose in the past week and hospitalization rates jumped by 10 percent. The looming threat of the newly identified omicron variant of the coronavirus also hangs over the country as it enters the holiday season.

Omicron cases have been detected in 21 states so far, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker, most recently in Texas on Wednesday.

The World Health Organization, drug companies and U.S. health officials have so far said omicron may prove more transmissible than previous variants but potentially cause milder cases of covid-19. However, they have issued strong caveats, saying the data is preliminary and research is ongoing to find out more about the variant, with no firm conclusions yet drawn.

Read more at The Washington Post.