For the health officials who steer vaccination campaigns, it’s going to be a complicated fall.

The U.S. plan to roll out updated Covid-19 boosters will not only coincide with the logistical tangle of the regular flu shot drive, but will also face questions about when people should get the new shots to provide themselves with the best protection through our third Covid winter.

It’s a balancing act that health officials run into every year with flu. Vaccinating tens of millions of people takes weeks. People also need a few weeks after their shot for their immune systems to be fully primed. And yet, vaccinators don’t want to put shots in arms too early, either. The power of the flu shot wanes over months, so the concern is that someone who gets a shot in say, September, may lose a chunk of their protection if the peak of the season is going to be in February.

Read more at STAT News.

Novavax Inc (NVAX.O) said on Monday it had filed for U.S. authorization for use of its COVID-19 vaccine as a booster dose in people who had either received its shots or a different vaccine.

The application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration comes in the face of a slow rollout in the United States, where the Novavax vaccine was authorized in July, despite expectations that it would convince vaccine skeptics to get inoculated.

“It’s important for people to have a choice as they evaluate how to stay protected against COVID-19,” Chief Executive Officer Stanley Erck said in a statement, referring to the Novavax vaccine that uses a traditional technology.

Read more at Reuters.

The news that the poliovirus has been found circulating in New York City wastewater fueled a wide range of reactions in city parents on Monday. Some were unfazed. Others were terrified.

Public health officials, however, had a simple message for them: Get your children vaccinated. If they are vaccinated, they are safe.

In South Williamsburg, a largely Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn where the polio vaccination rate among 5-year-olds is the lowest in the city, mothers in playgrounds pushed swings and watched their children play. With only one case found so far, in a Rockland County resident who became paralyzed, several mothers said they thought of the situation as something to watch out for, but not an imminent threat.

Read more at The New York Times.

As kids head back to school, they’ll need more than new supplies. Many students will be getting a new round of required vaccines.

August is Immunization Awareness Month, a time to make sure we are all up to date on required vaccinations. The most common vaccines kids will need are for measles, mumps, whooping cough, and polio.

“These vaccines truly have made an impact on getting rid of these illnesses, which is why parents may not have heard of them or experienced them,” says Dr. Reggie Washington, Chief Medical Officer of Presbyterian/St. Luke’s and Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children.

Read more at CBS.

A polio case identified in New York last month is “just the very, very tip of the iceberg” and an indication there “must be several hundred cases in the community circulating,” a senior official with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CNN on Wednesday.

The case was found In Rockland County, which has a stunningly low polio vaccination rate. Dr. José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, noted that the majority of people with polio don’t have symptoms and so can spread the virus without knowing it.

“There are a number of individuals in the community that have been infected with poliovirus. They are shedding the virus,” he said. “The spread is always a possibility because the spread is going to be silent.”

Read more at CNN.

With the monkeypox vaccine still in short supply, the Biden administration is changing how the vaccine is administered in order to stretch its limited number of doses.

On Tuesday afternoon, federal health officials announced their decision to allow the JYNNEOS vaccine to be administered between layers of skin — what’s known as an intradermal injection — rather than into the fat as is currently done.

By offering the shots in this way, only a fifth of the full dose is needed for each person.

Read more at NPR.

Ticks that carry Lyme disease have been on the march, spreading into more forests and brush areas around the U.S. and Europe. But lovers of the outdoors could get a new weapon against Lyme, if a new vaccine candidate performs well. It aims to protect people as young as five.

If it were to gain regulators’ approval, it would become the only Lyme disease vaccine available for humans in the U.S. But it’s expected to take years for the potential vaccine to reach the market. If the phase-three study is a success, the companies say, they would likely seek official authorization in 2025.

The new vaccine is called VLA15, and as of this week, it’s now in the third phase of a clinical study in humans. It was created by Pfizer and French drugmaker Valneva.

Read more at NPR.

Following its emergency authorization last month, just 7,300 doses of Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to Americans across the country, newly updated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals.

According to John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, the sluggish start may be, in part, due to the fact that the vaccines were not immediately made available after authorization, and thus, there could be some reporting delays.

The total Novavax doses represent just a fraction of the shots put into arms each day, though the overall number of vaccines administered has plummeted in recent months.

Of all the recipients of the monkeypox vaccine, a little more than 77% are white or Caucasian.

In Colorado, much of the vaccine disparities the state experienced during COVID are once again occurring as health leaders work to provide vaccinations for monkeypox. 

As of right now, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) has been vaccinating those who are eligible or considered ‘high risk’ for contracting monkeypox.

There are at least 79 cases of monkeypox in Colorado, according to CDPHE data.

Despite the outreach efforts, white Coloradans overwhelmingly received the vaccine before other demographics. Population estimates from Colorado’s demographer show the state is 65% white. But, 77% of the vaccine went to white residents, according to CDPHE data obtained by 9Wants to Know. 

Read more at 9 News.

A recent case in a New York suburb has reignited concerns over the disease.

During the slog of yet another Covid wave, and mounting monkeypox anxieties, health officials in a New York suburb reported a case of polio in July — the first detected in the United States in nearly a decade.

State health officials said that polio was detected in an unvaccinated person in Rockland County, New York, and that the virus had been found in county wastewater samples in June, as well as in wastewater samples in two different locations in Orange County, New York. These occurrences, as well as reports that health officials in Britain had detected evidence of poliovirus in sewage samples in London, have reignited polio concerns.

Here’s what you need to know about the disease.

Read more at The New York Times.