Now is the time to get vaccinated to stay safe and healthy amid holiday gatherings and rising levels of respiratory viruses, including the flu, Covid-19 and RSV, experts say.
“To protect yourself and your family this holiday season, take the steps that we do every year to protect ourselves,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a video posted to social media Wednesday. “It’s not too late to get vaccinated if you haven’t already.”
Last year, days after the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines were authorized for emergency use in children as young as 6 months, Laura Labarre’s children’s pediatrician’s office held a large drive-through vaccine event at a local amusement park.
“It was beautifully organized, and we just drove right up. The kids never even got out of their car seats,” said Labarre, a mom of two in Portland, Oregon.
This fall, wanting to get her kids the updated Covid-19 vaccine that was released in mid-September, she called the same pediatrician’s office, thinking it would be a piece of cake.
COVID-19 vaccines for children received a good deal of scrutiny when they first became available in 2021. Chatter online and elsewhere indicated that parents were becoming less likely to vaccinate their children due to growing misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines.
But were parents really becoming more vaccine-hesitant because of rumors about the COVID-19 vaccines? Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH, a professor of pediatrics in the Section of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and an investigator at the Adult & Child Center for Outcomes Research & Delivery Science (ACCORDS), wasn’t so sure.
“Throughout the pandemic, you saw a lot of headlines around COVID vaccine refusal and how that refusal was spilling over into other routine vaccines,” O’Leary says. “But a lot of that was based on stories or personal narratives, interviews with parents or pediatricians or family doctors. I work with a lot of general pediatricians, and I’m married to one, and I was hearing the other side of that coin — that some people who formerly refused vaccines were now asking to catch their kids up. It seemed a lot more complicated than simply, ‘People are refusing COVID vaccines, so now more are refusing other routine childhood vaccines.’”
If it feels like you know a lot of people who are home sick, it is not your imagination.
Health officials say there has been a surge of flu cases, and it has come with many people suffering from COVID-19 and RSV.
The flu can be deadly to adults and children. For one family, tragedy struck two decades ago, but the pain is still there, and they want people to know just how important vaccines are.
“We’ve never thought that something like this could happen to us,” said Alissa Kanowitz of Scarsdale.
As the United States heads into the colder weather months, cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have been ticking up across the country.
For the week ending Nov. 25, there were 8,863 positive RSV tests recorded, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is typical for this time of year.
This is slightly down from the previous week, when 9,914 tests were recorded and compared to last year when 16,067 positive tests were recorded during the same period.
Although most cases of RSV result in mild illness, the virus can be dangerous among infants and young children as well as senior citizens.
With the holiday season underway, and families and friends gathering to celebrate, a leading Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s pediatrician has one word of advice for parents: Vaccinate.
Shervin Rabizadeh, MD, chair of Pediatrics at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s, says vaccinating your child helps protect the whole family, including elderly grandparents.
“Vaccines are critical in preventing transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19, especially during upcoming holiday gatherings,” Rabizadeh said. “You want to prevent and stop passage of the virus between individuals, and kids are often the vectors. They are the petri dishes that pass things on, so this [vaccination] is a great means of prevention.”
In the United States, annual flu vaccine campaigns begin in early September, before temperatures start to cool down and the cycle of people catching and spreading virus commences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that most people get vaccinated as soon as updated shots become available for the season. And in an ideal world everyone would be vaccinated by the end of October.
But what if you missed the pop-up vaccine clinic at work and put off going to a pharmacy or doctor’s office for your shots?
A few medical employees at Denver Health made history Monday as some of the first people to receive the live Ebola vaccine for preventative measures, the hospital said.
Ebola is a rare but deadly disease. In 2014, a major outbreak in West Africa led to some cases in the United States. While there are no known outbreaks in the world right now, members of Denver Health’s High Risk Infection Team said they are some of the first to receive the live vaccine as a way to be prepared in the event of a future outbreak.
Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data that brought attention to a horrifying trend: the infant death rate in the U.S. increased by 3 percent in 2022.
The rise in infant mortality marked the first significant increase in about two decades. After the news broke, some people took to social media to spread anti-vaccine misinformation and attempt to fabricate a story that COVID-19 vaccines were to blame. It’s no secret that online pregnancy support groups are rife with vaccine misinformation, and the power of misinformation has real-life impacts. Pregnant women, who are at a higher risk for severe illness, have relatively low vaccination rates against COVID-19.
After years of declining vaccination coverage worldwide, measles deaths increased by 43% in 2022, compared with 2021. The number of total reported cases rose by 18% over the same period, accounting for approximately 9 million cases and 136,000 deaths globally, mostly among children. This information comes from a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO), published in partnership with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The report also notes an increase in the number of countries experiencing significant measles outbreaks. There were 37 such countries in 2022, compared with 22 the previous year. The most affected continents were Africa and Asia.
