The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still requiring international visitors boarding flights to the United States to be vaccinated against Covid-19, but it’s easing vaccine requirements for those travelers.

International travelers boarding flights to the United States will now be considered fully vaccinated two weeks after getting a single dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine any time after August 16, 2022, when bivalent formulations first became available. The updated travel guidance was posted on the agency’s website on Thursday.

The change aligns with the CDC’s recently simplified vaccine guidance for Americans; those who are unvaccinated are now considered fully vaccinated after a single dose of a bivalent vaccine, which protects against more strains of the virus than the original shot.

Read more at CNN.

Ever since vaccines were invented and introduced, childhood deaths from infectious diseases have plummeted drastically. If vaccines didn’t exist, we would see 37 million more deaths from 2000 to 2019, mostly in children younger than 5 years. Vaccines are, therefore, a necessity.

But some people still doubt vaccines. Before the pandemic, nearly 6 in 10 people worldwide were unsure or believed that vaccines cause autism. A comprehensive survey uncovered that the top reason parents do not vaccinate their children is that vaccines might cause harm, i.e., 69% of parents. Other reasons were that vaccines might overload the immune system (49%), the child was not at risk for the disease (37%), the disease was not dangerous (21%), and the vaccines might not work (13%).

Just last month, I wrote about why some people still believe vaccines cause autism. So in this article, I’ll discuss whether too many vaccinations will overload the immune system.

Read more at Medium.

67 million children missed out on critical vaccines in the past three years

UNICEF renewed its commitment to ensure that every child gets vaccinated with the release of its 2023 State of the World’s Children (SOWC) report on Thursday — calling on governments to act urgently to shore up flagging immunization services, and announcing a new catch-up and recovery campaign to help them do it.

Vaccination coverage dropped sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving millions more children unprotected against some of childhood’s most serious diseases, according to the report. The deteriorating situation reflects not just pandemic-related disruptions in primary health care services, however; declines in immunization are also the result of conflict, fragility and extreme weather events in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Somalia, Ukraine and other countries, the report states.

Read more at Forbes.

An expert panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccination policy informally endorsed a plan Wednesday to offer an additional Covid-19 booster shot to people 65 and older as well as people who are immunocompromised, and to simplify the Covid vaccine schedule.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices was not asked to vote on the changes, announced Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration. But in their discussions, the committee of outside experts appeared broadly supportive of the new guidance.

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky signed off on the changes later Wednesday. The action allows older adults who have gone more than four months since their last vaccine dose and immunocompromised people who have gone two months to get another dose of the bivalent messenger RNA vaccines made by either Moderna or the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership.

Read more at STAT News.

The Biden administration plans to spend more than $1 billion on a new program to offer free coronavirus shots to uninsured Americans after the vaccines move to the commercial market later this year, administration officials said on Tuesday.

The program for the uninsured, which will be modeled partly on an existing childhood vaccination program and will cover an estimated 30 million people, will include a first-of-its-kind partnership with pharmacy chains in which the government will pay the administrative costs of giving the doses to patients. Pfizer and Moderna have pledged to offer the shots at no cost to those who lack insurance.

Read more at The New York Times.

A majority of Americans are unaware that HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., can cause a number of major cancers, a new study found. Researchers were surprised over one finding in particular: a decline in awareness that HPV, human papillomavirus, is linked to cervical cancer.

Nearly all sexually active women and men become infected with HPV at some point, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to CDC estimates, currently more than 42 million Americans carry at least one strain of HPV. About 13 million people are infected each year.

In the new study, which will be presented Tuesday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting, researchers analyzed nationally representative survey data collected by the Health Information National Trends Survey that monitored U.S. adults’ knowledge about the virus’s connection to cancer. There were about 2,000 to 2,300 annual respondents to the survey, including for 2014 and yearly from 2017 to 2020.

Read more at NBC.

Many people in the U.S. who are fully vaccinated and boosted for COVID have been waiting—eagerly in some cases—to receive another layer of protection as they pass the six-month mark after their last booster in fall 2022. But most will have to continue to wait. Late last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention upheld its existing COVID vaccination recommendations: the agency says that just one dose of the latest updated booster, often called the bivalent booster, is necessary for now. The Food and Drug Administration has also only authorized the same one-dose booster.

This contrasts with official guidance in other countries. In early March Canada and the U.K., for example, began offering an additional booster dose to certain populations at high risk of severe COVID, including elderly people, residents of long-term care facilities and immunocompromised individuals. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends countries consider an additional booster six or 12 months after the last for older adults, those who have comorbidities or who are immunocompromised or pregnant, and frontline health care workers. The WHO also says healthy children from six months to 17 years old may not need any additional boosters.

Read more at Scientific American.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is looking to the future of Covid-19 as the country enters a new phase in the pandemic. 

A senior administration official says DHS is launching a $5 billion investment to help develop new types of vaccines and treatments. It’s called Project NextGen.

The government is looking to get ahead of the rapidly-evolving coronavirus.

Researchers hope the next generation of vaccines can shut down the infection before it ever gets the chance to make anyone sick. 

This comes as the public health emergency for Covid-19 is set to end on May 11.

Read more at CBS.

The death of an Eaglecrest High School teacher over the weekend from symptoms consistent with bacterial meningitis – which prompted the school to cancel evening activities Tuesday and classes Wednesday to conduct contact tracing – had us asking:

What is bacterial meningitis? And what should people know about the infection?

Denver7 took these questions and more to UCHealth Senior Medical Director of Infection Prevention Dr. Michelle Barron and other health sources to learn more about bacterial meningitis.

Read more at Denver 7.