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.

Just a few months ago, it looked like the U.S. had lost its chance to eliminate the spread of monkeypox – that is, stamp out the outbreak and get cases down to zero, except for new infections that come from abroad.

Experts worried it was just a matter of time before the virus started spreading more widely in the U.S., especially in settings like daycare centers and college dorms.

Now it’s clear those concerns did not materialize. Some infectious disease experts are even raising the idea that the U.S. could eliminate the virus.

Monkeypox cases have declined since a peak in early August – from 440 cases a day, down to 60 – and they’re the lowest they’ve been since June. The virus has continued to circulate almost entirely within gay and queer sexual networks. And vaccine supply is plentiful, even outstripping the current demand.

Read more at NPR.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday recommended a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot for children as young as 5, aimed at the Omicron variant, hours after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the shot.

The big picture: The announcement comes as the White House continues to monitor a rise in the COVID-19 subvariants emerging and evolving throughout the world.

• CDC Director Rochelle Walensky signed off on a decision memo expanding the use of the shots without waiting for a meeting of the CDC’s advisory committee, CNBC reports.
• With approval from the CDC and the FDA, pharmacies can now begin administering the shots as soon as they’ve received the dose shipments.

Details: The FDA’s emergency use authorizations apply to the Moderna and Pfizer bivalent vaccines.

Read more at Axios.

Vaccine experts are pushing back on an analysis published by Florida’s surgeon general that warns COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of cardiac-related deaths in young men, calling the study poorly designed and dangerously misleading.

The warning against vaccines from Dr. Joseph Ladapo is the latest move by the state surgeon general and his boss — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — that casts doubt on scientific consensus as they tap into voter frustration still lingering from the pandemic.

“I love the discussion that we’ve stimulated,” tweeted Ladapo on Monday after being accused by immunologists and doctors of spreading misinformation.

“Isn’t it great when we discuss science transparently instead of trying to cancel one another?” he added.

But if Ladapo wanted to spark a scientific discussion, he would have submitted the health department’s work for peer review instead of posting it on the Florida government website, said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Read more at ABC.

It seems like an almost impossible dream — a cancer vaccine that would protect healthy people at high risk of cancer. Any incipient malignant cells would be obliterated by the immune system. It would be no different from the way vaccines protect against infectious diseases.

However, unlike vaccines for infectious diseases, the promise of cancer vaccines has only dangled in front of researchers, despite their arduous efforts. Now, though, many hope that some success may be nearing in the quest to immunize people against cancer.

The first vaccine involves people with a frightening chance of developing pancreatic cancer, one of the most difficult cancers to treat once it is underway. Other vaccine studies involve people at high risk of colon and breast cancer.

Read more at The New York Times.