Vaccines that offer protection against both COVID-19 and influenza with a single shot will likely not be ready in time for this year, a top federal official said Wednesday. However, tweaks to update the current COVID vaccines and drugs are expected soon. 

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccines official, Dr. Peter Marks, had previously said in September that vaccines to cover both viruses could be deployed this year. 

But at a webinar this week by the National Foundation for Infectious Disease, Marks acknowledged the effort had proved “too heavy a lift” for this fall, ending hopes of a combined option for the 2023 fall and winter respiratory illness season.

Read more at CBS.

DENVER — Inside Children’s Hospital Colorado, doctors know they’re treating patients who could’ve avoided ending up there.

“It’s always really challenging to see any kid sick and it’s worse when you know that something could have been done to prevent it,” said Dr. Jessica Cataldi, a Pediatrician and Infectious Disease Specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado. 

The doctors treating Colorado’s kids are seeing something in their emergency rooms they aren’t used to. More and more kids are coming to the hospital sick with diseases that are preventable with vaccines. Since the start of the pandemic, doctors say vaccine uptake has decreased.

“My biggest concern as physician is that diseases that we can prevent, and in some cases diseases that we even eliminated from the U.S. with vaccinations are coming back and are now becoming more common again,” Cataldi said. 

Read more at 9 News.

COLORADO — When kids end up at Children’s Hospital Colorado the priority for Dr. Jessica Cataldi is getting them well.

At times the Infectious Disease Specialist also has uncomfortable discussions about vaccines that could have prevented the trip to the hospital.

“It’s always a difficult conversation to have with families to say, you know, there may have been something that could have been done, but now, it’s too late. And we’re dealing with treating this disease that may be making you very sick,”

New data shows Colorado is 32^nd in the nation for kids completing the CDC recommended series of vaccines.

Read more at KOAA.

An estimated 20,000 people attended a large religious gathering in Kentucky on the same days as a resident who was infected with measles last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday, with potential contacts who may have been exposed to the highly transmissible virus now spanning multiple states and countries.

The CDC is urging doctors to “be on high alert for measles symptoms” among people who attended the gathering and is actively working with Kentucky authorities to search for additional cases.

“Community transmission of measles in connection with this event is possible, particularly among unvaccinated or under-vaccinated individuals,” CDC spokesperson Scott Pauley said in a statement.

Read more at CBS.

A community event in Thornton on Friday offered an opportunity for refugee families from Afghanistan to get needed vaccines.

“They will be nervous but I think they will be fine,” Farid Stanikzai said.

He’s helping six-year-old, Hafsa and her sister seven-year-old, Hajira, and their family navigate life in the U.S. 

Because of their father’s work, they were forced to flee their home.

“They were there because they were happy, back there they wanted to help their country their people but the regime collapsed and because of their affiliation with the U.S. government they were not safe for them to stay,” he said.

Read more at CBS Colorado.

Most reader questions continue to focus on covid-19, as reflected in my recent newsletters addressing masking, long covid and whether some need a second bivalent booster shot. But the coronavirus is far from the only pathogen worthy of attention.

In central Ohio, for example, a measles outbreak that began in November has sickened at least 85 children. Most were younger than 5, and all those who were infected were either unvaccinated or not yet fully vaccinated.

Measles is one of the most contagious respiratory viruses — even more so than the highly transmissible coronavirus variants. An unvaccinated person has a 90 percent chance of contracting measles if they are around someone infected with it. The virus is airborne and can still be contagious to others two hours after the infected person has left the room.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Fear engulfed everyone during the pandemic. Yet when a vaccine became available, it was met with fierce resistance. Anti-vaccination crowds formed, and some of these groups argued this vaccine was against their religious beliefs.

Many didn’t trust the scientists and their explanation for how they said the disease spread. A lot of people didn’t believe the vaccine worked as well as governments claimed, or they felt mandatory vaccinations violated their personal freedom.

Misinformation also proliferated, sowing doubt about the safety of vaccines and accusing governments and scientists of sinister motives.

Read more at Gavi.

Pfizer’s vaccine that protects infants from respiratory syncytial virus could receive Food and Drug Administration approval by the end of this summer.

Pfizer on Tuesday said the FDA is reviewing the vaccine on an expedited basis. The agency is expected to make a decision on whether to clear the shot in August, just before respiratory virus season.

The single-dose vaccine is administered to expectant mothers in the late second to third trimester of their pregnancy. The antibodies triggered by the shot are passed to the fetus, and protect infants against RSV from birth through the first six months of life, when they are most vulnerable.

The vaccine was 82% effective at preventing severe disease from RSV in newborns during the first 90 days of life, according to data from Pfizer’s clinical trial. The shot was about 70% effective during the first six months of the baby’s life.

Read more at CNBC.

Through the use of social media, celebrities and other people in the public eye helped to shape the public discourse and opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic and public health efforts, according to an analysis of over 45,000 tweets posted from January 2020 to March 2022.

While there were small differences in sentiment observed, a “broadly polarized negative tone” was noted among certain public figures who shared a consistent pattern of emotional content related to their risk perceptions, political ideologies, and health-protective behaviors, reported Arash Shaban-Nejad, MPH, PhD, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, and co-authors.

During these first 2 years of the pandemic, tweets by well-known figures such as Joe Rogan, Eric Clapton, and former President Donald Trump included mostly negative sentiments about COVID vaccines and other public health measures like masking, with tweets showing a clear pattern of increasing negativity over time, the authors noted in BMJ Health & Care Informatics.

Read more at Medpage Today.

In some ways, we’ve been lucky with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The virus that causes it is highly contagious but not as lethal as others in its coronavirus family. The initial SARS virus killed roughly 1 in 10 of those infected; a relative called Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, still kills 1 in 3.

But we may not always be so lucky. With animals, including bats, colonized by hundreds of coronaviruses, another one might come along with the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 and the death rate of MERS. 

Hoping to prevent that, scientists on Tuesday unveiled a “road map” for developing a new vaccine that would be broadly protective against all coronaviruses.

Read more at USA Today.