There was the home health attendant who sucked her thumb before touching household items. And the one who brought her unvaccinated 4-year-old into the apartment where Mary and her immunocompromised husband live, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And the one who came by after her day shift at a nursing home.

Many of the aides who circulated through Mary’s household were vaccine-hesitant or outright anti-vax; many wore their mask improperly while in the apartment, she told me. A few came in with sneezes, sniffles, and coughs that—as Mary and her husband learned only after asking—were symptoms of an active COVID-19 infection.

Read more at The Atlantic.

Just before Christmas, a right-wing journalist named Ben Bergquam became seriously ill with COVID-19.

“My Christmas gift was losing my [sense of] taste and smell and having a 105-degree fever, and just feeling like garbage,” Bergquam said in a Facebook video that he shot as he lay in a California hospital.

“It’s scary. When you can’t breathe, it’s not a fun place to be,” he said.

Bergquam told his audience he wasn’t vaccinated, despite having had childhood asthma, a potentially dangerous underlying condition. Instead, he held up a bottle of the drug ivermectin. Almost all doctors do not recommend taking ivermectin for COVID, but many individuals on the political right believe that it works.

The details revealed in Bergquam’s video provide a rare view into the prescription of an unproven COVID-19 therapy. Data shows that prescriptions for drugs like ivermectin have surged in the pandemic, but patient-doctor confidentiality often obscures exactly who is handing out the drugs.

Bergquam’s testimonial provides new and troubling details about a small group of physicians who are willing to eschew the best COVID-19 treatments and provide alternative therapies made popular by disinformation — for a price.

Read more at NPR.

Some babies whose mothers received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy have been shown to develop virus-fighting antibodies by the time they reach six months in age, according to a research letter published Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

According to Reuters, the small study has not yet been peer-reviewed and only tracked a few dozen subjects. However, the findings offer hope that some children will develop tools to fight COVID-19 even though they’re not eligible to be vaccinated themselves.

According to the research letter, the study tracked a handful of women who got either the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine during their pregnancy. Those mothers all got their shots between 20 to 32 weeks gestation — when, according to Reuters, the transfer of maternal antibodies to the fetus via the placenta is at its highest.

Researchers followed up with 28 of those babies six months after birth and found that 16 — or 57% — had developed detectable antibodies that can fight COVID-19.

Read more at The Denver Channel.

Johnson & Johnson’s easy-to-deliver Covid-19 shot is the vaccine of choice for much of the developing world.

Yet the American company, which has already fallen far behind on its deliveries to poorer countries, late last year quietly shut down the only plant making usable batches of the vaccine, according to people familiar with the decision.

The facility, in the Dutch city of Leiden, has instead been making an experimental but potentially more profitable vaccine to protect against an unrelated virus.

The halt is temporary — the Leiden plant is expected to start churning out the Covid vaccine again after a pause of a few months — and it is not clear whether it has had an impact on vaccine supplies yet, thanks to stockpiles.

Read more at The New York Times.

Last summer, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an internal presentation on the coronavirus, which was leaked to the press, called the Delta variant of covid-19 “as transmissible as chicken pox.” Although the claim was found to be overstated, it’s easy to see why researchers may have been predisposed to draw parallels between the two diseases. Both varicella-zoster—the proper name for the chicken-pox virus—and the coronavirus are spread through the air, and both can be contagious before any symptoms are evident. Both have relatively mild impacts on most children, with a higher risk of more serious effects in adults. The mostly apocryphal tales of “covid parties”—which almost always turn out to be unintentional spreader events—descend from those of “chicken-pox parties,” where parents knowingly exposed their children to symptomatic peers.

There was also a kind of wistfulness in the comparison. A vaccine for varicella received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, and within a decade forty states and the District of Columbia added varicella as a required immunization for enrollment in public elementary schools. Today all fifty states enforce this mandate. (Medical and religious exemptions vary state by state.) Near-universal mandatory immunization against chicken pox virtually eliminated the disease in the space of a generation.

Read more at The New Yorker.

Omicron, the latest variant of COVID-19, has led to a surge in cases and hospitalizations, raising talk of fourth booster shots and variant-specific vaccines. But what if there were a universal coronavirus vaccine that protected against omicron and all new COVID-19 variants?

At Wednesday’s press briefing, White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci explained the term “pan-coronavirus vaccine.” 

Said Fauci: “There have been five SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and now the current omicron. And so obviously, innovative approaches are needed to induce broad and durable protection against coronaviruses that are known and some that are even at this point unknown. Hence, the terminology ‘pan-coronavirus vaccine.'”

In a surprise twist, it’s not Moderna, Pfizer or any pharmaceutical company that is leading the research into pan-coronavirus vaccines — it’s the US Army.

Read more at CNET.

Nearly four decades after its discovery, HIV has killed 36.3 million people, with no vaccine in sight. However, a new study by researchers at The Wistar Institute, an international biomedical research leader in cancer, immunology, infectious disease, and vaccine development, takes a promising step in the direction of developing an HIV vaccine.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, demonstrate the promise of using a unique native-like trimer to develop Tier-2 neutralizing antibodies — the kind that matter for combating HIV — in mice for the first time.

Previously, eliciting these types of antibodies using candidate vaccines required long and expensive experiments in large animal models creating a significant bottleneck on HIV-1 vaccine development. “With our new finding, we have opened the door to rapid, iterative vaccinology in a model that can produce Tier-2 neutralizing antibodies, enabling development of more advanced HIV vaccine concepts,” said Daniel Kulp, Ph.D., associate professor in the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at The Wistar Institute and corresponding author on the paper.

Read more at Science Daily.

A broad and bipartisan group of senators is coalescing around legislation to create a high-level independent commission, modeled after the one that examined the Sept. 11 attacks, with broad powers to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and the response across the Trump and Biden administrations.

Under a plan proposed by the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Health Committee — Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Richard M. Burr of North Carolina — a 12-member panel would have subpoena power to “get a full accounting of what went wrong during this pandemic,” Ms. Murray said in an interview, and make recommendations for the future.

The legislation, being circulated as a draft, is still in its early stages; Ms. Murray said she hopes to get feedback from colleagues within a month, followed by a hearing and a markup. In this highly polarized environment, both she and Mr. Burr acknowledged that politics could derail it.

Read more at The New York Times.

The idea that we could use a vaccine to defeat cancer is not, says Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech, a new one. “We have had this thought for almost 100 years.”

The concept is simple, he says. “We stimulate the immune system, do something magic, and the tumour disappears.”

For most of those 100 years there has, though, been one small problem.

“We had to solve the ‘something magic’.”

Now, the man whose company gave us the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — applying himself to the comparatively simple problem of stopping a pandemic — believes it is, at last, time to use the same technology to fill in that magical gap. He is not alone. Today Sajid Javid, the health secretary, launched a ten-year plan for…

Read more at The Times.

Scientists in South Africa have made a copy of the Moderna Covid vaccine, a move which they say could help boost vaccination rates across Africa.

The continent currently has the lowest uptake of Covid shots in the world.

The company behind the new vaccine – Afrigen Biologics – says it hopes to start clinical trials in November.

Moderna previously said it would not enforce the patents on its vaccine, allowing scientists in Cape Town to make their own version of it.

The researchers were backed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Petro Terblanche, director of Afrigen Biologics, said they were starting small, but had ambitions to scale up quickly.

“We have used the sequence, which is the same sequence as the Moderna vaccine 1273,” she told the BBC.

“This is part of a global initiative to build capacity and capability in low and middle-income countries to become self-sufficient.”

The shot being copied is a messenger RNA vaccine made by US firm Moderna. Pfizer-BioNTech also made its vaccine using the same technology. They were some of the first Covid vaccines to be authorised for use around the world.

Read more at BBC News.