DENVER — During the weekend of January 22, residents in Denver, Arvada and Castle Rock woke up to what many of them described as appalling. 

“Who gets up in the morning and decides to do something like this? Who plans their day around doing something so awful?” said a Denver Country Club resident who asked to remain anonymous. 

Antisemitic and anti-vaccine flyers were left on various doorsteps and sidewalks, stored in plastic baggies and weighed down with rice. One flyer shows a picture of three women next to two QR codes and the words “Save Your Race.” The other one includes the message “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish.”

Similar leaflets were also distributed in neighborhoods in Texas, Florida, California and Maryland. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — an organization that tracks antisemitic assaults, vandalism and harassment nationally — believes a loose network of antisemitic individuals organized the flyer distribution. Police are investigating the incident. 

Read more at Rocky Mountain PBS.

he average daily rate of Americans receiving COVID booster shots has fallen by half since a peak of about 1 million people getting boosters per day in December to about 490,000 as of last week, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.

About 63 percent of Americans, amounting to about 210 million people, have been fully vaccinated in just over a year since the COVID vaccination program began in the U.S., according to the CDC. However, only 84 million of those people, or about 40 percent of fully vaccinated individuals, have received a booster shot since they became available late last year.

Research has shown that booster doses can provide protection against COVID, especially the Omicron variant, which has proven to be more vaccine resistant than prior variants, the Associated Press reported.

In Colorado, the state health department reported that those who had received a booster shot were about 7 times less likely to be hospitalized than those who were fully vaccinated, and about 46 times less likely than unvaccinated individuals, according to Axios.

Read more at Newsweek.

The two most successful coronavirus vaccines developed in the U.S. – the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – are both mRNA vaccines. The idea of using genetic material to produce an immune response has opened up a world of research and potential medical uses far out of reach of traditional vaccines. Deborah Fuller is a microbiologist at the University of Washington who has been studying genetic vaccines for more than 20 years. We spoke to her about the future of mRNA vaccines for The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Below are excerpts from that conversation which have been edited for length and clarity.

How long have gene-based vaccines been in development?

This type of vaccine has been in the works for about 30 years. Nucleic acid vaccines are based on the idea that DNA makes RNA and then RNA makes proteins. For any given protein, once we know the genetic sequence or code, we can design an mRNA or DNA molecule that prompts a person’s cells to start making it.

When we first thought about this idea of putting a genetic code into somebody’s cells, we were studying both DNA and RNA. The mRNA vaccines did not work very well at first. They were unstable and they caused pretty strong immune responses that were not necessarily desirable. For a very long time DNA vaccines took the front seat, and the very first clinical trials were with a DNA vaccine.

Read more at The Conversation.

Despite new data showing the effectiveness of boosters and the skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases due to the more infectious omicron variant, the CDC has no plans to change its definition of “fully vaccinated.” The term still means two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer mRNA vaccines or one shot of Johnson & Johnson. Instead, the agency is pivoting to the more general descriptor of “up to date” to describe effective vaccine protection.

At Friday’s White House press briefing, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was asked by CNN, “Can you explain why the CDC is not changing the definition of ‘fully vaccinated,’ given that could potentially encourage more people to get a third shot?” The US has currently boosted 85.5 million people, or about 40% of people considered fully vaccinated.

Walensky responded: “In public health, for all vaccines, we’ve talked about being up to date for your vaccines. Every year, you need a flu shot; you’re not up to date with your flu shot until you’ve gotten your flu shot for that year. … What we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be.”

Read more at CNET.

When thousands of protesters gathered on the National Mall on Sunday morning to protest Covid vaccine mandates, they did so, they insisted, to preserve personal freedoms. “No more mandates!” they shouted as they marched, serpentine and coiled, like the snakes on the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags hoisted above their heads. “This is not about vaccine or anti-vax,” JP Sears, a comedian known for spreading conspiracy theories through sarcastic comedy, told the crowd. It was, he asserted, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

But it was, very much, about vaccines. Children’s Health Defense Fund, the political wing of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vax organization, hosted the event. Kennedy, who has been vocally spreading false claims about vaccine safety for decades, addressed the crowd to offer unsubstantiated warnings of the Covid-19 vaccines’ dangers. So did several doctors, wearing their physician whites, who also touted ivermectin to prevent Covid (it won’t) and rehashed long-debunked studies suggesting vaccines cause autism (it doesn’t). Just days after the CDC released its first study showing vaccine boosters help protect patients against hospitalization from Omicron, Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and well-known vaccine skeptic, falsely told the crowd: “The science is settled: they’re not working.”

Read more at Rolling Stone.

Thousands of demonstrators protesting vaccine mandates descended onto Washington, D.C., on Sunday, mostly maskless, with some sporting far-right and pro-Trump memorabilia and others drawing comparisons between the vaccine and the Holocaust.  

The Metropolitan Police Department told The Hill there have been no arrests or police reports as a result of the gathering around the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial as of late Sunday afternoon. But some locals worried the crowd could devolve into chaos, with some recalling the recent anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack, which was preceded by a rally of pro-Trump supporters protesting the certification of the 2020 election, according to WUSA.

Rally organizers predicted that roughly 20,000 people would attend the event; however, The Washington Post reported that a seemingly smaller crowd of a few thousand had gathered by Sunday afternoon.

Read more at The Hill.

This past summer, Rupali Limaye says she “sort of became the vaccine lady at the pool.”

She’s a behavioral and social scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, so it made sense that other parents were coming to her for information. Limaye has also spent the past decade studying vaccine hesitancy. In that work, she has come to understand deeply that when someone has doubts, hearing the facts from someone the person knows well can be a powerful force in overcoming those doubts.

She knows, too, that not all families have that kind of relationship with a doctor. “We’ve had such an erosion of trust in the health care system and in public health,” she says “that we should really leverage the peer-to-peer approach, right?”

So Limaye and Johns Hopkins have created a free two-hour course on the online platform Coursera that’s open to anyone. It’s called COVID Vaccine Ambassador Training: How to Talk to Parents.

Read more at NPR.

PHILADELPHIA–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-recommended vaccinations for teens and adults continued to lag in 2020 and into the summer of 2021, according to a follow-up claims analysiscommissioned by GSK and conducted by Avalere Health, an Inovalon company. This assessment follows two previous reports tracking the pandemic’s significant effect on routine vaccination.

Key findings include:

• From January 2020-July 2021, monthly vaccine claims decreased on average 32% for adults and 36% for adolescents when compared to the same months in 2019.
• Cumulatively, adults and teens may have missed an estimated 37.1 million doses of recommended vaccines compared to 2019.

“It’s very concerning to continue to see millions of missed CDC-recommended vaccinations among both vulnerable age groups,” said Barbara Howe, MD, Vice President and Director, Vaccines Medical and Clinical, US at GSK. “We know the ongoing pandemic presents challenges to important efforts to catch up and then exceed pre-pandemic vaccination levels, but we must not become complacent. Lower vaccination rates cannot become the norm, or we may find ourselves grappling with a number of public health crises for diseases that could have been prevented.”

Read more at BioSpace.

As the world grappled with vaccinating against Covid-19 last year, a mix-and-match approach to jabs emerged as a potential solution to roadblocks like vaccine hesitancy, safety concerns, and supply chain issues.

In the months since, numerous studies have shown that administering different Covid-19 vaccines for the first and second doses induces a strong immune response against the novel coronavirus, and recent research has even suggested that mixing jabs is more effective than administering two doses of the same vaccine.

Now, with vaccine booster programmes underway across the globe, the next question is whether this mix-and-match rule applies to booster doses. More than 36 million booster doses have been administered in the UK so far, while over 62 million people in the US have received a third shot. According to GlobalData’s Covid-19 booster dashboard, millions of people in the US have received heterologous booster shots – that is, the third vaccine dose differs from the ones given as primary doses.

Read more at Pharmaceutical Technology.

Twenty-one months into the global pandemic, millions of Americans continue to believe misinformation about vaccination and Covid-19, and these beliefs are associated with hesitancy to get themselves and their children vaccinated – or, if they are vaccinated, to get a booster for added protection against the omicron and delta variants.

In the fourth survey conducted with a nationally representative sample of more than 1,600 U.S. adults, in November 2021 the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania continued its tracking of misbeliefs and conspiracy theories that have persisted and, in rare cases, grown since the inception of the pandemic. The policy center has been conducting this panel study since April 2021, and began tracking beliefs about the novel coronavirus and vaccination even earlier, with cross-sectional surveys beginning in March 2020.

“Key consequential deceptions continue to predict hesitancy for oneself and one’s children and a reluctance to get a booster,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC). “Even though more people reject these conspiracies and misbeliefs than accept them, those that have become deeply rooted need to be repeatedly fact-checked, highlighted, and countered by media organizations and health care providers.”

Although confidence in him remains high, the survey also found a softening of support for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The face of the U.S. pandemic response, Fauci has weathered an extended onslaught of unjustified attacks in conservative and ultraconservative media. While his overall support is unchanged, with two-thirds of Americans confident Fauci is providing trustworthy information on treating and preventing Covid-19, the group of those who support him most strongly has diminished while the ranks of those with no confidence have grown. (See data below.)

Read more at The Annenberg Center.