President Joe Biden received his updated COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday while calling on more Americans to do so ahead of the winter and holiday season.

Biden was joined by leaders of major U.S. pharmacy chains Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid and Albertsons as well as Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the president’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha.

“We’re here with a simple message: Get vaccinated, update your COVID vaccine,” Biden said. “It’s incredibly effective, but the truth is not enough people are getting it. We’ve got to change that so that we can all have a safe and healthy holiday season.”

Read more at ABC.

As MacArthur Foundation fellow Jennifer Richeson noted in The Atlantic in 2020, Americans love to perpetuate narratives of racial progress, regardless of whether that narrative is aligned with reality.

We saw this in a recent New York Times essay that claimed the change in Covid-19 death rates is a laudable example of the U.S. overcoming racial injustice. Pointing to improvements in vaccination rates in Black and Hispanic communities, Times senior writer David Leonhardt wrote that the racial gap in death rates has also disappeared. “In a country with deep racial inequities, where Covid was initially another tragic example,” he went on to say, “the virus is no longer disproportionately harming Black and Hispanic Americans.”

And once again we are implored to use the story of redemption to whitewash the story of racial injustice.

Read more at STAT News.

And just like that, with the passing of Labor Day, fall was upon us. Seemingly overnight, six-packs of pumpkin beer materialized on grocery shelves, hordes of city dwellers descended upon apple orchards—and America rolled out new COVID boosters. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Since the beginning of the pandemic, cases in North America and Europe have risen during the fall and winter, and there was no reason to expect anything different this year. Spreading during colder weather is simply what respiratory diseases like COVID do. The hope for the fall booster rollout was that Americans would take it as an opportunity to supercharge their immunological defenses against the coronavirus in advance of a winter wave that we know is going to come.

Read more at The Atlantic.

The politicization of the pandemic has eroded public confidence in vaccines, which are among our greatest public health tools. This tragic response pertains primarily to the COVID-19 vaccines, but could soon extend beyond it.

This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorized COVID-19 booster shots for children as young as 5. As a doctor, I’m glad the CDC took this step. And Dr. Paul Offit, head of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee on vaccines, told me he also supports adding the coronavirus vaccine to the list of recommended immunizations for children.

Research highlights importance of vaccine for kids

The latest studies and data emphasize the importance of the vaccines for children. A study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that the Moderna vaccine was safe and effective for children from 6 months to 5 years. Clinical data indicates that the vaccines decrease severity and hospitalization in adults and children who contract COVID-19.

Read more at USA Today.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week pushed back on a claim made by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who said on his show that a CDC decision was likely coming to force kids to get COVID-19 vaccines in order to attend school.

But that’s not technically within the CDC’s authority, as the CDC pointed out in a rare tweet on Wednesday correcting a recent segment by Carlson, who has a history of criticizing COVID vaccine policy or sharing incorrect information about the shots.

Twitter also included a disclaimer along with the video from his show.

Carlson had claimed Tuesday that at an upcoming meeting of the CDC’s advisory committee, the agency was “expected to” update the list of routine childhood immunizations and include the COVID-19 vaccine, which would soon mean that kids “will not be able to attend school without taking the COVID shot.”

Read more at ABC.

The COVID-19 vaccine should become a regular part of the pediatric immunization schedule, an advisory panel to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted on Thursday.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices unanimously voted on Oct. 20 to approve updated versions of both the adult and pediatric immunization schedules for 2023, which include COVID-19 vaccines.

The vote now needs the CDC’s sign-off, which the agency is expected to give. If that happens, vaccines to protect against the coronavirus will appear on the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule alongside familiar childhood vaccines against such as hepatitis, meningitis, polio, flu and measles.

Read more at Today.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday recommended Novavax’s Covid boosters for adults in the U.S., including for people who received Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson’s shots as their primary series.

The Food and Drug Administration, in a factsheet for healthcare providers, said adults ages 18 and older can receive Novavax as their third dose six months after completion of the primary series of a U.S. authorized Covid vaccine.

The CDC gave the final go ahead for pharmacies to start administering the Novavax boosters just hours after the FDA had authorized the shots. Dr. Evelyn Twentyman, a CDC official, announced the Novavax recommendation during a meeting of the agency’s independent vaccine experts Wednesday afternoon.

Read more at CNBC.

In early 2020, when the coronavirus still felt like an offshore problem, I was working on a story about vaccine skepticism. The trend pre-pandemic was for states to restrict or roll back religious and philosophical exemptions for vaccine mandates, due to a series of measles and whooping cough outbreaks. I asked someone with an anti-vaccine group whether the coronavirus wouldn’t hurt their cause, because everyone in the world was going to be praying for a vaccine.

“You’re comparing apples to fruit salad,” she said. Mandates during a crisis were one thing, she suggested, but they weren’t necessary when there’s not an emergency.

The reason there’s not a measles crisis, I thought, is because there’s already a measles vaccine. At the time, I never dreamed that the COVID-19 pandemic would turn into a market opportunity for vaccine skeptics, but that’s exactly what happened. What had been a fringe position — that vaccines are dangerous — has now entered the political mainstream. “The average person would say that vaccines are good,” says Ohio state Rep. Beth Liston. “Now all of a sudden it seems legitimate to question them.”

Read more at Governing.

A top White House health official on Monday issued a stark warning to older people about the health risk they face this fall and winter from Covid-19.

Dr. Ashish Jha, head of the White House Covid task force, said everyone older than 50 and senior citizens in particular need to get an omicron booster as soon as possible.

“If you’re over 50, certainly if you’re over 65, you’ve got to go get these vaccines because it actually, literally could save your life. It’s a difference between life and death,” Jha said during an interview with Yahoo Finance.

The elderly have faced the high risk of falling seriously ill with Covid since the beginning of the pandemic. More than 330 people, on average, are still dying every day from Covid, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read more at CNBC.