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.

I understand how difficult it can be to make choices that affect your family’s health. Conflicting information can be found everywhere and has become even more abundant during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Being skeptical and learning as much as we can before we make important decisions is a good thing but researching information regarding our health and well-being can be complicated. Today’s world is filled with conflicting information online, in the media, and among peers and family members — it’s hard to know which sources are accurate and reliable. Conflicting information during the pandemic has also come from scientists and medical experts.

Read more at Medium.

In the United States, cancer continues to be the second most common cause of death behind only heart disease. In 2023, the American Cancer Society estimates that there will be close to 2 million new cases of cancer and just over 600,000 deaths. 

One cancer that we must talk about, especially during February’s Black History Month because of the disproportionate way it affects women of color, is cervical cancer.

According to the World Health Organization, cervical cancer is the fourth most common form of cancer among women globally. In this country, the American Cancer Society estimates that there will be roughly 13,960 new diagnoses of invasive cervical cancer and 4,310 deaths from the disease this year alone. Those numbers should shock you. They translate into a death rate of nearly 31 percent for a disease that is not only almost entirely preventable through vaccination and screenings, but is also treatable and curable when it’s caught early.

Read more at The Hill.

Roughly six decades after the first attempt to develop a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, the Food and Drug Administration is poised to approve several shots by next winter.

No RSV vaccine has ever been approved in the U.S. The FDA is reviewing two applications — a vaccine from Pfizer and another from GlaxoSmithKline, both of which are for people ages 60 and up.

Close behind is a monoclonal antibody injection designed to protect babies from the virus. Although it is not technically a vaccine, it would serve the same purpose. The shot, from Sanofi and AstraZeneca, has already been approved in Europe, and the FDA began reviewing the companies’ application in January.

RSV infects most people by age 2, and it is common to contract the virus multiple times throughout life. In the U.S., the virus kills more than 10,000 adults 65 or older and around 300 children under 5 every year.

Read more at NBC.

The Biden administration is zeroing in on a plan to keep Covid vaccines, treatments and tests free for the uninsured into 2024, even as it plots a quicker wind-down of its broader pandemic response, four people with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO.

The initiative represents a bid to allay fears that the most vulnerable Americans could be left without access to Covid care once the government exhausts its ability to purchase vaccines and treatments and shifts responsibility for distributing them to the private market.

Biden officials expect the so-called commercialization process to start in the second half of this year. But under its tentative plan, the administration would stockpile a limited supply of shots, treatments and tests that could be distributed freely to the uninsured well after the U.S. transitions out of its current crisis era.

Read more at Politico.