HYDERABAD, India — On the outskirts of this centuries-old Indian city, a world away from its congested roads and cacophony, the gleaming modern laboratories of Bharat Biotech are churning out a Covid vaccine that would be sprayed into the nose rather than injected into the arm.

Currently available vaccines produce powerful, long-lasting immunity against severe illness, as several studies have recently shown. But their protection against infection from the coronavirus is transient, and can falter as new variants of the virus emerge — a failing that has prompted talk of regular booster shots.

Nasal vaccines may be the best way to prevent infections long term, because they provide protection exactly where it is needed to fend off the virus: the mucosal linings of the airways, where the coronavirus first lands.

Read more at The New York Times.

In a flurry of votes and orders issued over the past several days, both the state and local governments have begun to dismantle some of Colorado’s most visible remaining COVID restrictions.

Denver and Tri-County Health Department will allow their mask mandates to expire this week. Jefferson, Broomfield and Larimer counties are expected to do the same.

The state Friday night ended a provision of a public health order that required proof of vaccination for large indoor events in most metro-area counties. There is talk of new guidance for COVID precautions in schools.

The changes come at a time when COVID is still rampant throughout the state — a time when infection rates are higher in most places than when the orders were issued. And they also come as a new omicron subvariant of the virus has been found in the state, potentially threatening to stall the progress in beating back the disease.

But what’s most notable about these changes is that, according to the health officials implementing them, they are not meant to be part of the familiar tide of COVID restrictions, rising and falling as infections do. Instead, the end of these mandates is being talked about as the end of the emergency phase of the COVID pandemic. Period.

Read more at The Colorado Sun.

Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, has written a letter to seven Republican governors, rejecting their requests for exemptions from coronavirus vaccination mandates for their states’ National Guard troops.

The rejection — sent to the governors of Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska and Wyoming, who have all sought to allow their guard troops to refuse the vaccine without consequences — sets the stage for a potential legal battle.

“In making the decision to require vaccination against Covid-19 for service members,” Mr. Austin wrote, “I considered the thousands of hospitalizations and the hundreds of deaths among service members, civilians, and their families related to Covid-19. Covid-19 takes our service members out of the fight, temporarily or permanently, and jeopardizes our ability to meet mission requirements.”

Read more at The New York Times.

The most recent numbers on the state’s vaccine dashboard shows that only 38% of Colorado’s Hispanic population has been vaccinated with at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 

That is lowest percentage of all the demographic groups in Colorado. So we asked a medical expert who serves the Hispanic community in Colorado to tell us why that is.  

Dr. Gonzalez-Fisher, medical expert for the non-profit organization, Servicios de la Raza, said that it’s a combination of things that make it challenging for some people to get vaccinated. 

“About 42% of the people that we serve are uninsured and this is one of the things that has a certain impact on them,” Gonzalez-Fisher said.  “The other part is that a lot of the people that we serve are monolingual Spanish speakers, they don’t understand the system. They’re front line workers that don’t have permission from their employers to go to get a vaccine sometimes, and there is a lot of distrust in the system.”

Read more at 9NEWS.

On 11 January, just seven weeks after the Omicron variant was first reported, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of a “tidal wave” of infection washing from west to east across the world. Fifty of the 53 countries in Europe and central Asia had reported cases of Omicron, said Hans Henri Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe.

Countries would have to cope as best they could, he said, guided by their individual epidemiological situation, available resources, vaccination-uptake status and socio-economic context. In recent weeks, countries in Europe and the United States have felt the full force of the Omicron wave; in the United Kingdom, which has reported most infections, daily COVID-19 cases peaked at more than 160,000 earlier this month. Scientists there say all nations are facing the same major problem: the sheer speed at which the variant spreads.COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless

And although the WHO and others have suggested that huge numbers of Omicron infections could signal the end of the pandemic, because of the short-term surge in immunity that will follow, researchers warn that the situation remains volatile and difficult to model.

Read more at Nature.

The ever-evolving landscape of Covid-19 vaccines shifted again on Monday, with Moderna winning full approval for its jab from the Food and Drug Administration, and Novavax submitting a long-awaited application to the agency for an emergency use authorization for its vaccine.

The approval of Moderna’s vaccine, Spikevax, makes it the country’s second fully licensed vaccine to protect against SARS-CoV-2. It’s also the first product the Cambridge, Mass., biotech has brought through licensure in the United States. The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, Comirnaty, became the first to be fully approved in August.

Novavax, a biotech based in Gaithersburg, Md., also notched a milestone as it filed for authorization of its vaccine, the first time it has sought FDA authorization for a product. Its vaccine, currently known as NVX-CoV2373, is made differently than the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which both deploy messenger RNA to teach the immune system to recognize and attack SARS-2 viruses. Novavax’s jab is a so-called protein vaccine, which delivers nanoparticles of the SARS-2 spike protein to the immune system to activate its defenses against the virus. The application is for use in people 18 and older.

Read more at STAT News.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel rolled up his sleeve in December 2020 to receive a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, kicking off one of the world’s first mass rollouts of Covid shots, he declared that it marked “the beginning of the end” of the pandemic.

Thirteen months later, his prediction has proved far from true, but 10 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, a milestone that reflects the astonishing speed with which governments and drug companies have mobilized, allowing many nations to envision a near future in which their people coexist with the virus but aren’t confined by it.

The milestone, reached on Friday, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford, has not been arrived at equitably, even though 10 billion doses could theoretically have meant at least one shot for all of the world’s 7.9 billion people.

In the wealthiest countries, 77 percent of people have received at least one dose, whereas in low-income countries the figure is less than 10 percent. As North America and Europe race to overcome Omicron surges by offering boosters, with some nations even contemplating a fourth shot, more than one-third of the world’s people, many of them in Africa and poor pockets of Asia, are still waiting for a first dose.

The United States has administered five times as many extra shots — about 85 million — as the total number of doses administered in all of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

Read more at The New York Times.

The father of a Littleton Public Schools student who filmed himself misleading health staff to see if he could get a COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic using space in an LPS high school said the intention of the video was to shut down the clinic and the prevent similar ones in the future. 

Gregg McGough, the father of 15-year-old Owen McGough, sent the video filmed by his son to a right-wing Twitter account, “Libs of Tik Tok.” The video showed his son, who in the video used a fake name, handing staff a fake parental consent form at a vaccine clinic at Heritage High School on Jan. 21.

A similar video was filmed by a different LPS student who lied about their age in order to be offered a vaccine without parental consent.

Read more at The Colorado Sun.

Just before my son’s recent nine-month checkup, my wife and I debated whether to simply postpone it. It’s a “well baby visit” but the potential threats to his health felt real. The last time he went to the pediatrician, in November, the air inside the office was stuffy, and the waiting room crowded with children from various schools in and around St. Louis, all waiting to get their COVID shots.

By showing up for the vaccine, they were all following the recommended guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for children ages 5-11. But we were trying to follow the CDC guidance too, and for children too young for the vaccine, that means avoiding crowded or poorly ventilated places — like the pediatrician’s waiting room.

As we grappled with the decision, the news was bleak: COVID positivity rates, and hospitalizations, were reaching record levels in St. Louis, and across the country.

We decided to go ahead with the visit after my wife called the office and learned they had moved their COVID testing outside to the parking lot, and we could complete the check-in process over the phone, instead of in the waiting room.

Read more at NPR.

Ever since governments in Australia started sharing the vaccination status of those people unfortunate enough to have died due to Covid, or to require treatment in an intensive care unit, this information has been taken out of context.

The numbers often show that of the people who died, or are in the ICU, a significant number had been vaccinated.

Social media accounts of people who routinely share anti-vaccine misinformation, including some politicians, have taken this information out of context to present a false narrative that vaccines are ineffective.

However, there’s a simple reason that the argument from anti-vaxxers is wrong – and a relatively simple thing that governments could do to give people important context around these numbers.

When the number of vaccinated and unvaccinated people who have died, or ended up in ICU, is shown as a proportion of the total number of people in the state we can clearly see the protective effect of vaccines.

Read more at The Guardian.