U.S. regulators on Thursday cleared doses of the updated COVID-19 vaccines for children younger than age 5.

The Food and Drug Administration’s decision aims to better protect the littlest kids amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases around the country — at a time when children’s hospitals already are packed with tots suffering from other respiratory illnesses including the flu.

“Vaccination is the best way we know to help prevent the serious outcomes of COVID-19, such as hospitalization and death,” Dr. Peter Marks, FDA’s vaccine chief, told The Associated Press.

Read more at The Hill.

Cases of measles continue to grow in Central Ohio, following a joint warning from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization over a huge disruption in child measles vaccinations. Nearly 40 million children worldwide missed their measles vaccine in 2021, the health agencies said in late November. 

In Ohio, cases have doubled in the past couple of weeks and have surpassed 60, though the outbreak has mostly been contained to very young unvaccinated children. According to available data Thursday from the city of Columbus, 60 of the cases were in unvaccinated children and three were in partially vaccinated children who haven’t yet received their second dose. 

Fourteen of the cases have been in children under 1 year old, which is too young to be eligible for the vaccine.

Read more at CNET.

This year’s flu shot appears to be “a very good match” to the circulating strains, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a news briefing Monday. However, she noted that flu vaccinations are lagging behind the pace of previous years.

Through the end of October, CDC data shows that vaccinations for pregnant women, a group that is more vulnerable to severe illness from influenza, are down about 12% from the same point in 2021.

Vaccination rates for seniors, the age group most likely to be hospitalized with influenza, were down about 3 percentage points from October 2021.

Read more at CNN.

New Zealand’s health agency is taking the parents of a four-month old infant to court for refusing life-saving heart surgery if blood “tainted” by Covid vaccination is used, according to news reports, part of an alarming and dangerous trend propelled by persistent misinformation about the shots’ effect on blood.

KEY FACTS

Te Whatu Ora, New Zealand’s health service, has asked the courts to transfer guardianship from the infant’s parents so consent may be given to use donated blood during necessary open-heart surgery, according to the New Zealand Herald.

The child’s parents are refusing to grant consent for the operation unless blood given by unvaccinated people is used, describing vaccinated blood as “tainted.”

Read more at Forbes.

The new anti-vaccine movie “Died Suddenly” begins with an ominous warning: “This film is not suitable for children.”

Another warning to viewers would have been warranted, too — that the film’s claims are unsubstantiated and linked to conspiracy theories. 

“Died Suddenly” was produced by Stew Peters, a far-right radio show host with a history of spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19. A previous Peters film, “Watch the Water,” made the Pants on Fire claim that the coronavirus is a synthetic snake venom spread via COVID-19 vaccines and drinking water.

The new film, released Nov. 21, revives several debunked claims and repackages them to allege that COVID-19 vaccines are part of a depopulation scheme by global elites who want to establish a global regime.

Read more at PolitiFact.

Twitter said it will no longer enforce its longstanding Covid misinformation policy, yet another sign of how Elon Musk plans to transform the social media company he bought a month ago.

In 2020, Twitter developed an extensive set of rules that sought to prohibit “harmful misinformation” about the virus and its vaccines.

Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules and removed almost 100,000 pieces of content that violated those rules, according to statistics published by Twitter. The policy received acclaim from medical professionals: In an advisory to technology platforms, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cited Twitter’s rules as an example of what companies should do to combat misinformation.

Read more at CNN.

Americans gathered for Thanksgiving last week amid a flu season that’s worse than any has been in more than a decade, and experts continue to urge caution as multiple respiratory viruses circulate at high levels nationwide.

A growing number of US states – now 33 – are experiencing “high” or “very high” respiratory virus activity, and seasonal flu activity continues to be “elevated across the country,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the week ending November 19, nearly 1 in 10 deaths nationwide (9.4%) was due to pneumonia, influenza or Covid-19 – well above the seasonal baseline of about 6%. And the CDC estimates that there have been at least 6.2 million illnesses, 53,000 hospitalizations and 2,900 deaths from influenza this season.

Read more at CNN.

MONDAY, Nov. 28, 2022 (HealthDay News) — When pregnant women contract COVID-19, one in 10 will have moderate, severe or even critical symptoms, a new study finds.

So it’s important they get their COVID vaccines, experts say.

“Given that patients in all trimesters of pregnancy are susceptible to infection and severe respiratory illness from COVID-19, these findings add urgency to the need for vaccination of all pregnant individuals,” said study co-author Dr. Rachel Schell. She’s an assistant instructor in obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern in Dallas.

An estimated 182,000 pregnant women have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States during the pandemic to this point. Past research has shown they have an increased risk of severe and critical disease compared to people who are not pregnant.

Read more at U.S. News.

White House public health officials offered cautious optimism that Americans could begin to move on from coronavirus, but cautioned that keeping immunity vaccination up to date and combating scientific disinformation remained key for the country to successfully emerge from the three-year Covid-19 pandemic.

“If you look at where we were a year ago at this time, when [coronavirus variant] Omicron started to surge, we were having 800,000 to 900,000 infections and 3,000 to 4,000 deaths [a day]. Today, we had less than 300 deaths. Yesterday, we had 350 deaths, and … anywhere from 27,000 to 45,000 cases” Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the US president, said.

“That is much, much better than we were a year ago. But if you look at it in a vacuum, it’s still not a great place to be,” Fauci told CBS Face the Nation on Sunday.

Read more at The Guardian.

Already facing a challenging respiratory season, pediatricians in Ohio are now dealing with another foe: measles.

According to statistics provided to ABC News by the Columbus Public Health Department (CPHD), as of Tuesday afternoon, 19 children have contracted the virus.

Nearly half of these children were hospitalized due to severe symptoms of the infection. Almost half were under five years old.

The rate of children requiring hospitalization during this outbreak was nearly double what’s typically seen during measles outbreaks, Dr. Matthew Washam, pediatrician and chief of epidemiology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, told ABC News.

Read more at ABC.