Truck drivers protesting vaccine mandates are parking their rigs in the middle of intersections in Canadian cities, blocking traffic and, in some places, bringing daily life and business to a standstill. Their goal is to force federal officials to roll back pandemic restrictions.

How did a handful of people turn a country whose constitution calls for “peace, order and good government” into an unlikely springboard for a budding global movement?

It began on Jan. 22, when convoys of truck drivers departed from British Columbia en route to Ottawa, Canada’s capital, to protest a vaccine mandate — imposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — for truckers entering the country from the United States.

Mr. Trudeau initially dismissed the protesters as a “small fringe minority” — a majority of Canadians say they support public health measures intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus — but the protesters are having an outsize impact. The protests have spread to other cities, including Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary, as well as on the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, a vital link for the automobile industry.

Read more at The New York Times.

More than 10 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have reportedly been administered across 184 countries.

In the United States, more than 543 million doses have been administered so far.

Despite the widespread use of the vaccines, some people with cancer question whether the shots are safe for them.

A group of researchers has published a study on Feb. 7 that may provide some reassurance.

The researchers report that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, such as those manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna, are just as safe for people with cancer as they are for everyone else.

The Fox Chase Cancer Center researchers in Philadelphia tracked short-term side effects from more than 1,700 recipients of the Pfizer vaccine.

They said they found no other reactions for people undergoing active cancer treatment (surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or radiation therapy) or who had completed treatment.

Read more at Healthline.

Austria has become the first Western democracy to require vaccines for nearly all adults. Everyone who isn’t exempt will be required to show proof of vaccination during random checks by the police.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

Austria has become the first Western democracy to require vaccines for nearly all adults. People who are pregnant have medical conditions or have recently recovered from COVID-19 are exempt from the policy, while others will be required to show proof of vaccination during random checks by the police.

Listen at NPR.

Misinformation and access to care could sway a parent’s decision to get their newborn children vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research from Stony Brook University.

Stony Brook researcher Heidi Preis and her team looked at how pregnant mothers’ experiences influenced their decision to give their infants regular vaccinations, like those for measles, mumps and rubella. She said some parents face barriers to vaccination — access to care, health insurance and paid family leave.

“Poverty is related to less of a vaccine uptake in infants, and race and ethnicity, so that minoritized groups are less likely to have their infants vaccinated,” Preis said.

Parents who used telehealth and spent less time in the hospital were less likely to vaccinate their kids. Preis said that’s especially concerning during the pandemic. So is vaccine hesitancy, which could come from social media misinformation.

“And people wrongly think that there’s a lot of risk involved, and don’t understand the importance of having their infants vaccinated in a timely manner,” Preis said.

Read more at WSHU.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to notice twinges of a feeling to which I have become unaccustomed. At first I thought it was indigestion, but I’m beginning to think it is actually cautious optimism. That’s because the recent Omicron surge underscored how well our COVID-19 vaccines are working.

Omicron was first documented in Botswana and South Africa in late November, 2021, and rapidly spread around the world. Yet something was different this time around. Compared with the Delta variant, Omicron infection resulted in notably lower hospitalization and death rates in South Africa and elsewhere.

There has been a rush to declare Omicron “milder” than Delta, and before we spend any time thinking about whether it is, we should remember that this “mild” virus was responsible for more than 15,000 deaths in the U.S. over the last week alone. And a virus this transmissible does collateral damage by infecting healthcare workers who must then isolate.

Having said that, at the peak of Omicron, the U.S. reported about ten times more daily infections than were recorded in the middle of November when Delta was the only variant in town. The Omicron peak however resulted in about twice as many deaths as we saw in the middle of November. It should be clear that were we seeing this many infections with Delta, things would be much, much worse than they are.

Read more at TIME.

Two years ago, when a pair of Houston scientists first began crafting a cheap, easy-to-make COVID-19 vaccine, they had a tough time finding support for it at home in the U.S., a country that rewards expensive, flashy new tech.

They could have used help with their goal of combating the virus both locally and abroad, where it was morphing into more dangerous variants headed for U.S. shores.

But the team at the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, led by Drs. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez, worked on their patent-free vaccine with donated money in relative obscurity, failing to garner much outside interest.

Then one thing finally broke through and spoke to the people who had been overlooking their open-science approach to the vaccine known by its first producer as Corbevax. It came without strings or a secret formula, making it a true humanitarian pursuit that could finally reach the unvaccinated corners of the developing world.

“Corbevax to beat inequity?” read a CNN News ticker beside a televised interview with the scientists last month.

Read more at The Texas Tribune.

About a year after wealthier nations began rolling out coronavirus vaccines, more than half the world’s population has been fully vaccinated — a logistical feat without precedent in human history.

But the global rollout remains uneven, with poor countries reporting much lower vaccination rates than rich countries. Public health experts have been warning that vaccine inequity is helping prolong the pandemic, as the focus of those seeking to speed up global vaccine coverage begins to shift from resolving a shortfall of supply to distributing doses and persuading people to get them.

Nearly 54 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to Our World in Data, an information partnership between the University of Oxford and the Global Change Data Lab charity. Nearly 62 percent have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

Read more at The Washington Post.

Colorado children under 5 years of age could be eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as early as Presidents’ Day, state health officials announced Thursday.

Scott Bookman, the state health department’s COVID-19 incident commander, told reporters during a weekly news conference that the state is preparing for vaccines to be made available to children in the month of February, “possibly as early as Presidents’ Day,” and that Colorado health officials are in talks with partners across the state to make sure they order vaccine shipments once they get the green light from the FDA and the CDC under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), a process which is expected to happen no later than Feb. 18.

State Epidemiologist Rachel Herlihy, from her part, said Colorado continues to see consistent improvement in the number of cases across the state, with the weekly average of new infections hovering in the 3,000s – numbers still well above what Colorado has seen in prior epidemic waves since the start of the pandemic.

Read more at The Denver Channel.

The rapid spread of omicron across the nation — and the finding that vaccines continue to provide strong protection against severe disease — brings covid-19 one step closer, perhaps, to truly earning its place on the list of diseases that have been tamed by vaccines. These include polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and chickenpox, all of which most kids must generally be vaccinated against before they enter school or day care. Some states have announced covid vaccine requirements for certain students.

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But not everyone agrees that vaccine mandates for children are the way forward. Sen. Rand Paul, who has opposed vaccine mandates, called omicron “nature’s vaccine.” Seventeen mostly Republican-led states have proactively banned, in some form, covid vaccine requirements for students. Resistance to adopt mandates has profound repercussions, especially as vaccination rates among kids ages 5 to 11 remain alarmingly low — under 15% in some states — even though children 5 and over have been eligible for shots since last fall.

History holds lessons for why low vaccination rates for children are so risky and why officials should strongly consider school mandates for the covid vaccine.

Read more at Kaiser Health News.

The Food and Drug Administration’s upcoming review of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for young children is without precedent in recent history.

Next week, scientific advisers to the agency will decide whether to endorse two doses of the vaccine for children 6 months through 4 years of age, before clinical trials have shown the full course — three doses — to be effective. Such an authorization would be a first for the agency, many experts say.

In fact, interim results from the trial suggested that two doses of the vaccine did not produce a strong immune response in children aged 2 through 4. Results from trials of the third dose are expected in a few weeks.

The companies applied for authorization at the urging of the F.D.A., also highly unusual. The fast-moving pandemic has forced federal health officials to make important decisions with limited data before, and they argue that it’s important to begin vaccinating young children now, before a new, potentially more dangerous variant arrives.

But the agency’s review of incomplete data as a basis for authorization has alarmed some experts.

Read more at The New York Times.