In the United States, COVID-19 vaccinations may have prevented more than 650,000 hospitalizations and 300,000 deaths among Medicare beneficiaries in 2021, according to a new report from HHS.

“This report reaffirms what we have said all along: COVID-19 vaccines save lives and prevent hospitalizations,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release. “We now have updated COVID vaccines designed to protect you against the omicron strain of COVID that makes up almost all COVID cases in the U.S. I urge everyone eligible to get an updated COVID vaccine to protect yourself ahead of the fall and winter.”

Read more at Healio.

Experts said a recently published study that found a possible association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and persistent asthma in early childhood did not prove there was a link.

The American Academy of Pediatrics published a story online with comments from James D. Campbell, MD, MS, vice chairperson of its committee on infectious diseases, who said that he welcomed the research and stressed that safety is a top priority in pediatric vaccines.

“The overwhelming benefit of the vaccines and the long-term safety we’ve seen from them should reassure parents they should still completely vaccinate their children,” Campbell said.

The AAP included a statement from the CDC, which said it “agrees with the authors [of the study] that this single observational study has important limitations and does not show that aluminum in some childhood vaccines can cause development of persistent asthma.”

Read more at Healio.

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, does not mince words when describing the scientific legacy of the Covid-19 vaccines: The mRNA shots, he said, are “the greatest scientific achievement in my lifetime.”

Yet as the weather starts to turn cold and as officials push for more people to get their new booster shot before an expected winter coronavirus surge, public health leaders are battling skepticism and apathy toward the vaccines. Worse, experts fear the politicized backlash to the Covid-19 vaccines is already fostering skepticism about routine vaccinations generally, from childhood immunizations to flu shots.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have drafted a pile of anti-vaccine mandate bills this year, chipping away at a foundational health practice for the last half-century. More than 80 anti-vaccine bills have been introduced in state legislatures, according to academics tracking the phenomenon, dwarfing the number of countervailing pro-vaccine bills. Public health experts are preparing for an all-out war on school mandates and other vaccine measures in states like Texas.

Read more at Vox.

The easiest way to promote a conspiracy theory is to take a grain of truth and blow it out of sensible proportion. This is exactly how one of the most pervasive sources of covid-19 vaccine hesitancy—misinformation about its impact on women’s fertility—spread.

When women of reproductive age started to be vaccinated in large numbers in the (northern) summer of 2021, some noticed that their periods following vaccination were later than normal. By September of that year, there were more than 30,000 reports to Britain’s medicines regulator alone of late periods following covid vaccines (with the true figure presumably higher, because of underreporting). Anti-vaxxers then used this phenomenon to scare women with speculations about long-term damage to their fertility.

Read more at The Economist.

For years, Jeri Stuart didn’t get a flu shot. Now, the 54-year-old breast cancer survivor does not want to gamble with her health. 

She got her flu shot last week. 

“My mother always hounded me to get them done,” she said. “I figured, you know what, let’s just get everything that we can to ensure that I don’t get sick.” 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging everyone 6 months and older to also get their flu shot. Public health officials are worried about a false sense of security after two milder flu seasons due to COVID precautions. 

Australia, which experiences winter ahead of the U.S., just had its worst flu season in five years. 

“I don’t want to be alarmist, but I am concerned. We know that it’s going to be a strain of flu that tends to be more severe,” said Dr. Michael Phillips, an infectious disease expert at NYU Langone Health. “For those ages greater than 65, there’s a specific formulations of vaccines that you should get and it dramatically reduces the likelihood of hospitalization and death.”

Read more at CBS.

As of late September 2022, nearly 78% of U.S. adults but only 31% of children ages 5 to 11 had completed the primary set of vaccinations against Covid-19, according to health authorities.

In an open-access article published in the journal Vaccine, researchers from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania attribute that dramatic discrepancy in part to the acceptance of misinformation about the safety of vaccines in general and the Covid-19 vaccines in particular.

The researchers found that U.S. adult hesitancy to be vaccinated against Covid is associated with misbeliefs about vaccines in general, such as that vaccines contain toxins like antifreeze, and about specific vaccines, such as the fears that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism (false) and the flu vaccine increases your chances of contracting Covid-19 (there is no evidence of this).

Read more at Science Daily.

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.