Throughout the pandemic you have been critical about vaccine inequity, especially in Africa. How did it feel when the W.H.O. director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked you to be special envoy to the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator?

I had been one of the most critical voices at some of the outputs of the ACT Accelerator. I had been agitator No. 1 for vaccine inequity. So my first thought was, “Oh my God, they will all hate me.”

It was a shake-up of the status quo; a fox in the henhouse. When Tedros called me to ask if I would do it, I said, “Have you got the right number?” And then I said, “Oh, no, no, no.” So he asked me to think about it, saying, “Your voice is needed, your steer is needed.”

I spoke to my husband, and he said, “Yodi, you have been at the forefront of saying those of us from the global south need to be heard. They have invited you to that table, you cannot say no.”

Read more at The New York Times.

It might not be long until a fourth COVID vaccine is available in the U.S., and it’s a big deal.

Novavax Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine is on its way towards authorization from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration after formally submitting a request in late January. 

The company says it has resolved the manufacturing issues that had delayed their application, and now expects approval from the FDA in the coming weeks, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. 

In clinical trials first published in January 2021, Novavax’s vaccine was up to 90% effective in preventing severe COVID-19 infections, on par with the already-approved vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. But questions remained about the company’s manufacturing capabilities that have delayed its ability to bring the vaccine to market.

Read more at Fortune.

Look at the dates: 1890-1918; 1878-1918; 1896-1918; 1917-1918 … Every person buried on this snowy slope in Barre, Vt, died within days, weeks of each other. “It’s pretty humbling,” said Brian Zecchinelli.

Nearly 200 died that Fall during that other pandemic, the 1918 so-called Spanish Flu.

Zecchinelli and his wife, Karen, own the nearby Wayside Restaurant now. It’s become a Vermont institution. “Effie Ballou opened the Wayside in July of 1918, and two months later the pandemic hits Barre,” he said.

Zecchinelli has never stopped thinking about how little he knew about the 1918 flu – and the fact that the grandfather he never met was one of its victims. He died at 35, on October 10 of that terrible year. Germinio Zecchinelli, like so many other Italian stone cutters, had moved to Barre to quarry granite, to carve the nation’s gravestones (and often each others’, as it turned out).

“The Spanish Flu is often referred to as the ‘forgotten flu,'” Zecchinelli told correspondent Martha Teichner. “And if we had anything to do with it, it wasn’t gonna be forgotten, Germinio and all the others. We wanted to do something to memorialize him and the 50 million others worldwide that died.”

Read more at CBS News.

Is Pfizer’s Covid vaccine less effective than previously believed in 5- to 11-year-olds?

On Monday, a paper that suggested as much was posted on a server by researchers with the New York State Department of Health; that paper has yet to be peer-reviewed. On top of the vaccine being delayed for children under the age of 5, the news came as a major disappointment to parents. The paper suggested that there has been a rapid decline in protection after vaccination among the youngest cohort of children eligible for vaccination, dropping off more quickly than the declines seen in slightly older children aged 12 to 17.

In their study, researchers analyzed data from 852,384 fully vaccinated children aged 12 to 17 years and 365,502 children aged 5 to 11 years between Dec. 13 and Jan. 31, 2022 — the peak of the omicron surge. The analysis suggested that the vaccine’s effectiveness against hospitalizations declined from 85 to 73 percent for the older children, and from 100 percent to 48 percent for 5- to 11-year-olds. Vaccine effectiveness against infection decreased from 66 percent to 51 percent for older children, and from 68 percent to 12 percent in the younger cohort.

Read more at Salon.

From the very beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden has pledged to make sure communities hit hardest by Covid-19 will receive sound information about the virus and access to vaccinations.”

Equity (and) equality” remain “at the heart” of the government’s responsibility, Biden said at a White House briefing last summer. “We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors.”

But some of the small groups representing communities of color that were contracted as part of a National Institutes of Health Covid-19 outreach project tell CNN they have not been paid properly.

“We lost trust in the system,” said Venus Ginés, president of Día de la Mujer Latina, who said the NIH effort has been “poorly managed from the beginning” and “poorly executed.”

Read more at CNN.

As soon as the vaccine mandate went into effect, people began to rebel. Some saw it as government overreach — what right did faraway lawmakers have to tell people what to do with their bodies?

Others worried that the vaccine was dangerous, or that they were being used as guinea pigs — what proof was there that this concoction even worked? Protests were staged, opinion pieces written, and parents resorted to subterfuge to avoid vaccinating their kids — they changed addresses to confuse officials, got fake vaccine certificates, and even tried to reverse the process once their kids had already been vaccinated.

This sounds like a tale of the Covid-19 era, with a vocal minority of vaccine opponents staging rallies and filing lawsuits across the United States. But all of the above also happened in 19th-century England, when the government mandated the smallpox vaccine for children. “​​As soon as that mandate is introduced, that’s when we get an organized anti-vaccination movement,” said Nadja Durbach, a history professor at the University of Utah. “That’s when people are like, ‘Oh my God, you cannot tell me to do this to my child.’”

Read more at Vox.

In yet another blow to Republicans who have waged war against COVID-19-related safety measures, Colorado House Democrats have voted down a bill that would have exempted employees with “naturally acquired immunity” from their employers’ COVID-19 vaccine and testing mandates.

The Naturally Acquired Immunity COVID-19 bill, backed by state Rep. Mark Baisley (R-Roxborough Park), falsely stated that “natural immunity” – also known as post-infection immunity – offered superior protection against SARS-CoV-2 compared with mRNA vaccines.

“What ultimately defends our bodies from COVID-19 is antibodies,” Baisley said in his opening statement at yesterday’s meeting of the House Health and Insurance Committee. “What we refer to as natural antibodies, natural immunity, is a more direct response to the actual signature of the virus [than a vaccine].”

Read more at The Colorado Times Recorder.

Kennedy Stonum, a high school junior, deflected repeated entreaties from her father to please get vaccinated against Covid-19.”I would send her articles. I would send her studies. I would send her whatever I thought might either scare her enough about Covid to get the vaccine or allay her concerns enough about the vaccine,” said Lee Stonum, 41, a public defender in Orange County, California. His mother, who lives in Cleveland, also sent emails to her granddaughter urging her to get the shots.”She was very skilled at blowing it off,” Stonum said of his only child. “It was constantly, ‘OK, I’ll think about it.’ It was never an outright ‘no.’ “

He was one of those kids who had to make every mistake himself, because he always knew best,” said Demello, 60, of Apex, North Carolina. “The more a mother’s lips move, the less the ears on their male children open.”

Both young people recently died of Covid-19 — Kennedy Stonum on February 11, Gilreath in September. The vaccines had been available to them for months before their deaths.

Tyler Gilreath, 20, resisted the constant nagging and cajoling of his mother, Tamra Demello, to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

Read more at CNN.

Nearly 60 million American adults — or about one of out every four — remain unvaccinated against Covid-19. They have made an irrational choice that exposes them to severe illness. But they have also made a choice with a long historical tradition.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Biden declared, “We will never give up on vaccinating more Americans.” And Biden is right that a continued vaccination campaign can do a lot of good, given that a large majority of Covid deaths and hospitalizations are still occurring among the unvaccinated and unboosted. The question, of course, is what arguments might win over any vaccine skeptics at this point.

Read more at The New York Times.

The incidence of cervical cancer is starting to rise in low-income U.S. counties and has plateaued in high-income counties in recent years, after years of decreases, according to a new study led by investigators from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) and published in JNCI Cancer Spectrum.

Cervical cancer is one of six major human papillomavirus (HPV)-associated cancers and the only one currently preventable through screening. The other types of HPV-associated cancers are oropharyngeal, anal, penile, vaginal, and vulvar. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year more than 46,000 HPV-associated cancers are diagnosed in the US — over 25,000 among women and 20,000 among men.

Investigators led by Ashish A. Deshmukh, PhD, MPH, associate professor in the Department of Management, Policy and Community Health at UTHealth School of Public Health, conducted a retrospective study of men and women diagnosed with HPV-associated cancers in the U.S. from 2000 through 2018 in the 21 registries in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program. They estimated incidence trends according to county-level household income and smoking prevalence. There were 252,648 cases of HPV-associated cancers included in the analysis. 

Read more at Newswise.