Colorado will soon phase out state-run COVID-19 vaccination sites and instead shift vaccine distribution to traditional health care settings. 

The move is part of the Roadmap to Moving Forward, the state’s new plan as the omicron wave rolls out. State-run clinics where many received their first doses of the vaccine — such as mall parking lots, community centers and churches — will close by the end of the month. 

Read more at CPR News.

How worried should Americans be?

That depends, experts say. There are still individual risk assessments at play, and many questions yet to be answered.

“In the context of the general population [individuals who are relatively healthy], I think waning immunity is not something we all need to be concerned about,” Dr. Jesse Erasmus of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, told MedPage Today.

Read more at ABC News.

Experts warn the Russian invasion into Ukraine may cause cases of polio, cholera and measles to surge because the infectious diseases thrive on the war’s unsanitary conditions, according to CNN.

“In terms of what we call vaccine-preventable diseases, the status in Ukraine was that the population was not vaccinated to the extent which you would get herd immunity like you would in many other European countries or in the US,” said Kate White, an emergency program manager for Doctors Without Borders, on Tuesday.

Read more at Yahoo!

Drugmaker Moderna asked the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday to authorize a fourth shot of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose for all adults.

The request is broader than rival pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s request earlier this week for the regulator to approve a booster shot for all seniors.

In a press release, the company said its request for approval for all adults was made “to provide flexibility” to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical providers to determine the “appropriate use” of a second booster dose of the mRNA vaccine, “including for those at higher risk of COVID-19 due to age or comorbidities.”

Read more at CBS News.

The Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine appears to be safe in people previously diagnosed with myocarditis, according to a small study presented Thursday at a European medical conference.

The findings, experts say, should help reassure people who previously experienced myocarditis that Covid vaccination is safe.

Read more at NBC News.

The CEO of the WHO Foundation has told CNBC that the global economy will lose “trillions of dollars” if more Covid-19 vaccines aren’t delivered worldwide.

Anil Soni, who became the Foundation’s first CEO in January 2021, said “the governments of Europe and the West have a clear obligation to donate excess doses and to put money on the table to buy the vaccines, the volumes necessary to deliver to 70% of the world’s population this year.”

The World Health Organization has set a target for 70% of the global population to be vaccinated by mid-2022.

Read more at NBC News.

The Omicron variant led to higher COVID hospitalizations among children ages 4 and younger in the U.S. — at a rate that was five times higher than during the peak of the Delta variant, according to a  new study released by the CDC.

Infants under 6 months had the highest rates of hospitalization, the data showed. Importantly, the CDC noted, this age group isn’t yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccination.

“Important strategies to prevent COVID-19 among infants and young children include vaccination of currently eligible populations such as pregnant women, family members, and caregivers of infants and young children,” the research team wrote.

Read more at WebMD.

Vaccine politics can apparently lead to some mismatched bedfellows, a new study suggests.

It found that about 1 in 6 U.S. couples have one partner who is vaccinated against COVID-19 and one who is not, and there are several reasons why.

“The numbers might be small in this study, but in terms of public health – if this translates to about 16% of the U.S. population, that’s a huge number,” said study author Karen Schmaling, a psychologist at Washington State University.

Read more at WebMD.

Forget temperature checks and deep-cleaning surfaces. The best way to protect people from Covid-19 as they return to offices and other indoor spaces is to bolster air quality and vaccination coverage, experts on the transmission of the virus say.

Their consensus reflects an evolving understanding of the spread of a virus that the World Health Organization declared the cause of a pandemic two years ago this Friday. Deep-cleaning surfaces and temperature checks—still a mainstay at many businesses—have been understood for many months to be of relatively little help stopping the virus from spreading. Rather, as businesses and communities across the U.S. begin what is shaping up to be the broadest return yet to pre-pandemic behaviors, transmission and infectious-disease experts said broad vaccine coverage and good air hygiene stand out as the most important mitigation efforts.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

Read more at TIME.