The CEO of the WHO Foundation has told CNBC that the global economy will lose “trillions of dollars” if more Covid-19 vaccines aren’t delivered worldwide.

Anil Soni, who became the Foundation’s first CEO in January 2021, said “the governments of Europe and the West have a clear obligation to donate excess doses and to put money on the table to buy the vaccines, the volumes necessary to deliver to 70% of the world’s population this year.”

The World Health Organization has set a target for 70% of the global population to be vaccinated by mid-2022.

Read more at NBC News.

The Omicron variant led to higher COVID hospitalizations among children ages 4 and younger in the U.S. — at a rate that was five times higher than during the peak of the Delta variant, according to a  new study released by the CDC.

Infants under 6 months had the highest rates of hospitalization, the data showed. Importantly, the CDC noted, this age group isn’t yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccination.

“Important strategies to prevent COVID-19 among infants and young children include vaccination of currently eligible populations such as pregnant women, family members, and caregivers of infants and young children,” the research team wrote.

Read more at WebMD.

Vaccine politics can apparently lead to some mismatched bedfellows, a new study suggests.

It found that about 1 in 6 U.S. couples have one partner who is vaccinated against COVID-19 and one who is not, and there are several reasons why.

“The numbers might be small in this study, but in terms of public health – if this translates to about 16% of the U.S. population, that’s a huge number,” said study author Karen Schmaling, a psychologist at Washington State University.

Read more at WebMD.

Forget temperature checks and deep-cleaning surfaces. The best way to protect people from Covid-19 as they return to offices and other indoor spaces is to bolster air quality and vaccination coverage, experts on the transmission of the virus say.

Their consensus reflects an evolving understanding of the spread of a virus that the World Health Organization declared the cause of a pandemic two years ago this Friday. Deep-cleaning surfaces and temperature checks—still a mainstay at many businesses—have been understood for many months to be of relatively little help stopping the virus from spreading. Rather, as businesses and communities across the U.S. begin what is shaping up to be the broadest return yet to pre-pandemic behaviors, transmission and infectious-disease experts said broad vaccine coverage and good air hygiene stand out as the most important mitigation efforts.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

Read more at TIME.

As we enter another year of this wretched pandemic that has killed more than 6 million the divide between the vaccine haves and have-nots is not only huge, it’s growing.

Across the US and Europe, where governments outbid others to procure sufficient supplies of vaccines for their populations, people are starting to gather with friends and family and travel more freely, planning long-awaited vacations to break out of “pandemic fatigue.” But there are billions of people around the world, including health workers, still waiting to be fully vaccinated and trapped in the cycle of outbreaks, lockdowns, disease, and death. The vaccine have-nots continue to wait, anxious, tired, only dreaming about traveling to reunite with loved ones or unable to attend funerals of those they lost.

This divide was not an inevitable consequence of the pandemic. It can and should be bridged.

For over 17 months, governments of high-income countries like the US, Switzerland, and EU member states have appeared at the World Trade Organization (WTO) assuring that the pharmaceutical industry would deliver on global availability of vaccines, testing, and treatments. But the rules that make it difficult to expand and diversify production of Covid-19 testing, treatments, and vaccines are still in place and a proposal to temporarily waive these rules, backed by over 100 low-and-middle income governments, remains stalled at the WTO.

Read more at Human Rights Watch.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) agency recently issued a public health notice regarding the prevention and control of infectious diseases related to visitors from Ukraine.

On March 8, 2022, the ECDC reported a large number of people from Ukraine are entering the European Union (EU) countries Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia. Unfortunately, many of those people, mainly women and children, are under-vaccinated against infectious diseases.

The ECDC stated, ‘Ensuring continuity of routine vaccinations and addressing gaps in prior vaccination histories is an essential element of the public health support for displaced people.’

‘In this context, ensuring vaccination coverage against poliomyelitis, measles, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 should be a priority.’

Read more at Precision Vaccinations.

Despite being among the first eligible for COVID-19 booster shots, many nursing homes are struggling to boost residents and staff, experts say.

Nationally, about 72% of residents are boosted in each nursing home, according to data from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services.MORE: Gap in COVID-19 vaccine uptake between urban and rural areas in the US continues to widen: CDC

But in about one-third of U.S. states, booster rates for residents are less than the national average among nursing homes, and three states have yet to crack an average of 60% of residents boosted in each facility.

Booster shots have been shown to be more protective against omicron and other COVID-19 variants. And nursing home residents continue to be among the most vulnerable people in terms of potential for severe illness and death — nearly 151,000 people in nursing homes have died since the beginning of the pandemic, CMS data shows.

Read more at ABC News.

For American parents, particularly those with young children, the last couple of months have been dizzying and beyond frustrating.

In early February, federal regulators announced that they would evaluate Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for the youngest children — only to scrap that plan 10 days later, citing doubts about the vaccine’s effectiveness in that age group.

Soon after, scientists reported that the vaccine was only weakly protective against infection with the Omicron variant among children aged 5 to 11 and that it appeared to offer little defense against moderate Covid illness among adolescents aged 12 to 17.

On Monday, citing these data, Florida’s surgeon general declared that healthy children need not be immunized, advice that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, called “deeply disturbing.”

Read more at The New York Times.

This season’s flu vaccine offers meager protection against mild cases of influenza, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

Against the most common flu strain circulating this season, the flu shot reduced a person’s chance of getting a mild case by 16 percent, which is “considered not statistically significant,” the CDC authors wrote, though the shots should offer some protection against more severe illness.

Full coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic

Put more bluntly, the flu vaccine was “essentially ineffective,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Indeed, research from earlier in the flu season found that the vaccine was a poor match for the H3N2 strain of the virus. That study, from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, was posted as a pre-print, meaning it had not been peer-reviewed.

Read more at NBC News.