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.

This story also ran on The New York Times. It can be republished for free.

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.

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.