The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized Novavax’s protein-based Covid vaccine for adults, providing Americans with an alternative to the mRNA-based shots from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

The Novavax primary series is given in two doses, administered 21 days apart.

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“Today’s authorization offers adults in the United States who have not yet received a Covid-19 vaccine another option that meets the FDA’s rigorous standards for safety, effectiveness and manufacturing quality needed to support emergency use authorization,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said in a statement.

Read more at NBC.

The worldwide monkeypox outbreak that began in early May has so far led to more than 7,500 infections in 57 countries, with more than 600 of them in the US. Behavioral strategies are critical for preventing monkeypox transmission — check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) refreshingly straightforward advice about cleaning fetish gear! — but with case counts still rising, vaccination against the virus is more urgently emerging as an important tactic for stopping its spread.

Monkeypox generally causes several days of flu-like illness and lymph node swelling followed by a blister- or pimple-like rash. While the version of the virus causing the current outbreak is rarely lethal, its lesions can be extremely painful and may leave scars.

Public health authorities have been administering vaccines to close contacts of monkeypox cases since the early days of the outbreak. But in recent weeks, they’ve been taking a more expansive approach to vaccination, offering it to people at risk for monkeypox exposure — even if they haven’t had contact with a confirmed case.

Read more at Vox.

COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rose globally during 2021 even during a time of uneven vaccine distribution, according to a new study published earlier this week.  

For the study, researchers surveyed more than 23,000 individuals across 23 countries, finding vaccine acceptance rose by 3.7 percentage points from the year earlier to 75.2 percent in 2021.  

The authors noted the most common forms of hesitancy stemmed from mistrust in the science and effectiveness and safety concerns. Other common reasons for hesitation were rooted in personal experience, like sickness.  

Read more at The Hill.

DENVER — The Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) is standing up vaccine clinics for monkeypox. The state’s overall strategy is different than it was for COVID, but some of the hurdles are the same.

We asked why those same issues are showing up after all the practice of the pandemic.

Read more at 9 News.

An “all-in-one” vaccine currently in development could protect people from future Covid-19 variants, as well as SARS, MERS and new strains of other coronaviruses from other animals, a study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology found.

Read more at Forbes.

The latest omicron subvariants — including the BA.4 and BA.5 forms causing new surges in infections in the United States — are even better at eluding vaccines and most antibody treatments than previous variants, finds a study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

The study, led by David D. Ho, MD, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Clyde’56 and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, was published July 5 in Nature.

Read more at Science Daily.

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have begun testing an experimental universal flu vaccine.
• A universal vaccine would be more effective and not require yearly shots.
• Scientists hope the vaccine can be delivered nasally, blocking infections and reducing transmission to other people.

“Influenza can be considered a ‘continuously emerging’ infectious disease, and the diverse and rapidly evolving influenza viruses are a significant public health threat,” Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, senior investigator for the NIH, told Medical News Today.

Read more at Medical News Today.

Clinics nationwide will begin offering vaccinations against monkeypox to anyone who may have been exposed to the virus, federal health officials announced on Tuesday.

Until now, immunizations were offered only to people with a known exposure.

States will receive doses of a safer and newer monkeypox vaccine called Jynneos from the federal stockpile, based on the number of cases and the proportion of the state’s population at risk for severe disease, the officials said at a news briefing.

Read more at The New York Times.

Meetings of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccines advisory committee are never dull affairs. Drenched in data, maybe, but never dull.

And Tuesday’s meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee promises to hew to that tradition as the independent vaccine experts are asked to debate whether it is time to update Covid-19 vaccines.

It seems pretty evident the FDA wants to hear “Yes” when the committee is asked to conduct its sole vote on the question: Does the committee recommend inclusion of a SARS-CoV-2 Omicron component for Covid-19 booster vaccines in the United States?

Read more at STAT News.

In a recent study published in The Lancet journal, researchers at Imperial College London quantified the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination programs in 185 countries and territories between December 8, 2020, and December 8, 2021.

Read more at News Medical.