Moderna will keep its COVID vaccine on the market at no cost to consumers, even after the federal government stops paying for it, the company announced Wednesday.

“Everyone in the United States will have access to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine regardless of their ability to pay,” the company said in a statement.

Last month, the vaccine maker was slammed for reportedly considering a dramatic price increase for the shot, which it had developed with the help of the federal government.

The proposal was also bad timing: The Biden administration was moving toward ending its designation of a public health emergencyon May 11, which meant that federal funding for vaccines would soon dry up and uninsured Americans would have to pay out of pocket for their boosters.

Read more at ABC.

The number of pediatric flu deaths during the current season has officially gone over 100, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — more than twice the number of the pediatric deaths confirmed in the last flu season.

The CDC reported nine pediatric flu deaths this week, bringing the total for the season up to 106. The agency also noted that it is the highest pediatric death rate for flu since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Most of these children were not vaccinated. This tragic milestone underscores the importance of vaccinating children against flu,” the CDC said in a statement.

Read more at The Hill.

CNN — Covid-19 shots are included in new schedules of routinely recommended vaccines released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday. The immunization schedules summarize current vaccine recommendations for children, adolescents and adults, but do not set vaccine requirements for schools or workplaces.

Key changes to the schedules, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Thursday, include the addition of Covid-19 primary vaccine series and recommendations on booster dose vaccination; updated guidance on influenza and pneumococcal vaccines; and new vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) and for hepatitis B.

Read more at CNN.

Washington, DC, 9 February 2023 (PAHO)- The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has issued an alert, urging countries of the Americas to update their response plans to prevent the re-establishment of endemic transmission of measles virus. This follows a reduction in childhood vaccination coverage, increasing the possibility for outbreaks of this disease.

“Vaccination and epidemiological surveillance of vaccine-preventable diseases are essential health services and should not be interrupted,” highlights PAHO in the alert, published yesterday.

According to the Organization’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on vaccines, the risk of outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the region is at its highest point in the last 30 years. PAHO estimates that in 2021 more than 1.7 million children in 28 countries and territories of the Americas did not receive an initial dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday.

Read more at Pan American Health Organization.

Kizzmekia Corbett had gone home to North Carolina for the holidays in 2019 when the headlines began to trickle in: A strange, pneumonialike illness was making dozens of people sick in China.

By the first week of January 2020, the number of infected people in China had climbed to the hundreds, and Dr. Corbett, a viral immunologist, was back at her desk at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as a senior research fellow at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And that’s when the news was confirmed: The mysterious illness was a novel coronavirus, exactly the category of infection that she had been probing for the past five years in a bid to develop a vaccine.

Read more at The New York Times.

When COVID-19 vaccines became available, Colorado public health officials initially relied on mass vaccination events publicized through Facebook, email and texts, and required Coloradans to book appointments online.

But when that go-big strategy drove large disparities in who was getting vaccinated, public health departments in the Denver area decided to go small instead.

They provided microgrants, small sums for one-time projects, to community organizations serving immigrants and minorities, and allowed those groups to determine how best to use the money.

Some used apps and social media, including WhatsApp, Nextdoor and Facebook Live. Others chose to pound the pavement and knock on doors. Vaccine promotion events occurred at Saturday soccer games and at the Mile High Flea Market.

Read more at The Denver Post.

After more than five decades of trying, the drug industry is on the verge of providing effective immunizations against the respiratory syncytial virus, which has put an estimated 90,000 U.S. infants and small children in the hospital since the start of October.

But only one of the shots is designed to be given to babies, and a glitch in congressional language may make it difficult to allow children from low-income families to get it as readily as the well-insured.

Since 1994, routine vaccination has been a childhood entitlement under the Vaccines for Children program, through which the federal government buys millions of vaccines and provides them free through pediatricians and clinics to children who are uninsured, underinsured, or on Medicaid — more than half of all American kids.

Read more at News Medical.

Cancer vaccines—it’s a concept seemingly torn from the plot of a futuristic sci-fi movie, or from the pages of some decades-old utopian novel far ahead of its time.

But such wonders of science exist today. And while much work lies ahead, they’ve been preventing cancer and saving lives for more than four decades.

“If you took a poll and asked people, ‘Do we have a vaccine against cancer?’ people would say no,” Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society, tells Fortune.

“They really don’t know that we do.”

Pharma giants BioNTech and Moderna recently made headlines for exploring the potential of mRNA vaccines, first employed with COVID, to treat cancer. Such vaccines use lab-created messengers, of sorts, that teach the body how to mount an immune response.

But clinical trials have long been underway using more traditional vaccine technologies—and participants are already receiving cancer vaccines, many personalized. A handful of vaccines have already received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And cancer-preventing vaccines have been around since the 1980s.

Read more at Fortune Well.

Starting in April, Colorado will see the largest shift in how people get their health insurance since the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014.

About 325,000 people in Colorado are expected to be disenrolled from Medicaid as federal rules requiring states to keep them on during the COVID-19 public health emergency come to an end, said Kim Bimestefer, executive director of the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.

That’s comparable to the 400,000 people who joined Medicaid in the first two years of its expansion to slightly higher-income groups in 2014 and 2015, she said.

It’s just one of a series of changes coming this year as the federal government’s COVID-19 public health emergency — and the expansions of social programs that came with it — comes to an end.

Read more at The Denver Post.

Pregnant women may be at higher risk from the flu this season, but it appears to have more to do with falling vaccination rates than with the virus itself.

Dr. Michelle Barron, senior director of infection prevention and control at UCHealth, said about half of the system’s female patients between the ages of 18 and 44 have been pregnant so far this year. During the 2019-2020 flu season — the last normal one before the pandemic — only about 17% were, which is more typical, she said.

“Seventeen percent to 50% is a huge jump, based on historically what we’ve seen,” she said.

Preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also shows a disproportionate share of hospitalized patients of childbearing age were pregnant. The CDC defines patients with childbearing potential as girls and women ages 15 to 49, and has found about 40% of those hospitalized in that group were pregnant at the time they got sick.

Read more at The Denver Post.