The general panic caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic spurred the demand for a safe and effective vaccine. Just a year after the initial report of a novel coronavirus emerging in Wuhan, China, later named the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), two vaccines were rolled out, both built on a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) platform.

The question remains, are such vaccines safe during pregnancy and lactation, or will they unfavorably affect the fetus or neonate? A recent study attempts to answer this question in lactating women who received the vaccines within six months postpartum.

Read more at News Medical.

The first large, real-world study of the effectiveness of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy found these vaccines, especially two initial doses followed by a booster, are effective in protecting against serious disease in expectant mothers whether the shots are administered before or during pregnancy.

Pregnant women were excluded from COVID-19 mRNA vaccine clinical trials, so this new study fills a significant knowledge gap, providing strong evidence that vaccinating women who are or might become pregnant protects against hospitalization for the disease during pregnancy.

That two doses plus a booster are known to be safe and demonstrate protection against severe disease in pregnant women is reassuring, given growing evidence of increased risk of poor maternal outcomes associated with COVID-19 infection during pregnancy. This strongly suggests that, along with other preventive measures that expectant mothers or women who are considering getting pregnant can take to promote a healthy pregnancy, getting vaccinated and boosted against COVID should be high on the list.”

Brian Dixon, PhD, MPA, Study Co-Author, Director of Public Health Informatics for Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health

Read more at News Medical.

A number of scientists have wondered if aluminum, a vaccine additive that has been used for decades, had a role in allergies and asthma in children.

A new federally funded study has found a possible link, but experts say the research has important shortcomings and is not a reason to change current vaccine recommendations. The study doesn’t claim aluminum causes the breathing condition, and officials say more work is needed to try to confirm any connection, which hadn’t been seen in earlier research.

Even if a link were ever found, the life-saving benefits of the vaccines are still likely to outweigh the asthma risk, said Dr. Matthew Daley, the study’s lead author. But it’s possible that if the results are confirmed, it could prompt new work to redesign vaccines, he added.

Dr. Paul Offit, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, worried that the flawed study will needlessly scare some families away from proven vaccines. “Making an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence,” Offit said. This study does not offer that kind of evidence, he said.

Read more at AP News.

With the rollout this month of a new coronavirus booster, U.S. public health leaders once more face the challenge of persuading Americans that they should roll up their sleeves and get another, possibly better, shot targeted at the omicron strain.

This has become tougher with each successive vaccination campaign.

About 68% of the U.S. population has received either two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson, but only one-third has chosen to get a booster. In Canada, much of Europe, Japan and South Korea, people have chosen to get additional doses at far higher rates.

This summer, when COVID-19 vaccines were finally authorized in the U.S. for children under 5, they met with low demand. By mid-August, just under 5% of kids under 5 had received their first shots and only about 1% were fully vaccinated.

Read more at ProPublica.

HPV vaccinations among teens in the US dropped precipitously during the early pandemic, a disappointing reversal for shots that can prevent more than 33,000 cases of cancer each year. Worse, efforts to get vaccinations back on track could be stymied by legal challenges.

We can’t let a decade worth of slow and steady progress in HPV vaccinations be lost.

Getting the US public to accept the HPV vaccine as a safe and effective part of routine health care has been a decade-long slog. That effort involved allaying (unfounded) beliefs that these shots, by preventing HPV, could encourage sexual activity among teens. That’s because the virus excels at spreading through skin-to-skin contact — so much so that nearly everyone is exposed, perhaps more than once, during their lifetime. And while the immune system can get rid of the infection most of the time, certain strains can stick around for years, kicking off a process that morphs otherwise healthy cells into cancerous ones.

Read more at Bloomberg.

In a study published in JAMA Network Open today, scientists report on how effective the original vaccine and booster shots are against the COVID-19 Delta and Omicron variants.

Researchers in Ontario analyzed data from more than 134,000 people, including those who tested positive for Delta and Omicron infections during December 2021. They found that people who were fully vaccinated (with two doses of an mRNA vaccine, from either Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech) experienced a decline in vaccine effectiveness against both Delta and Omicron infections, but the drop was greater against Omicron than against Delta. Among the vaccinated, the shots’ effectiveness declined from 36% up to two months after the second dose of the primary series, to 1% up to four months later (or six months after the second dose).

Read more at Time.

New boosters for 5- to 11-year-olds are just weeks away from authorization, the vaccine chief at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Peter Marks, said Tuesday.

While primary vaccines are already authorized for children 6 months and older, the FDA has yet to authorize the newly updated booster shots — designed specifically to combat currently circulating omicron subvariants — for the youngest Americans.

Those boosters, which were authorized at the beginning of the month for everyone 12 and older, will next be authorized for children in the elementary school age range, and then later be authorized for kids under 5.

Read more at ABC.

With ski season and flu season right around the corner, Vail Resorts is now encouraging employees to get their flu shots (and COVID-19 shots while they’re at it) in order to help keep their work staff fully operational no matter what sickness waves move through the high country.

“There is not an unlimited supply of employees,” John Plack, Vail Resorts spokesman said. “The safer and healthier we can keep our employees on the mountain and at home through things like flu vaccines and COVID 19 vaccines … we are supportive of all health and safety measures.”

Each year there’s a big push for folks to get their flu vaccine, and while Pharmacy Manager Mariah Mayerle said there was actually a increase in people coming in to get their shot while everyone was also coming in for COVID-19 shots, she said the increased health requests are weighing a bit on the public now.

Read more at CBS Colorado.

Less than 325,000 of America’s youngest children are fully vaccinated as hesitancy continues to dog the pandemic response.

Why it matters: Health officials are sounding the alarm over the potential of low child vaccination rates fueling transmission and carrying the risk of severe illness for some of the youngest Americans.

• “What’s at stake really with this is that we’re going to be setting up a bunch of kids for risk of severe disease in the future,” Daniel Blatt, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the University of Louisville and Norton Children’s Hospital, told Axios.
• “We don’t really know what the next variant is gonna be. And the way to get ahead of that next variant is to give children a blueprint on how to fight it and that’s what the vaccine does.”

Read more at Axios.