Moderna is poised to commercialize its COVID-19 and influenza combination vaccine by the fall of 2023, with some potential for the same drug to also be viable against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). 

Speaking at the World Economic Forum today, Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel hopes to develop a single annual booster dose to eliminate the need for people to get two to three jabs every time the winter season nears. Bancel did not give any details on the timeline of the vaccine’s release other than predicting that they might do so next year. 

The COVID-19 booster shot is currently being evaluated in several Phase III studies, while its efficacy and safety as a treatment for flu is still being developed and could progress to Phase III trials in the following months. In September last year, Moderna had also hinted at the possibility of using the same shot for RSV and other similar respiratory diseases.

Read more at BioSpace.

Early data out of Israel suggests that a fourth dose of either the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna coronavirus vaccine can bring an increase in antibodies — more than what’s been seen after a third dose — but it still might not be enough to protect against breakthrough infections caused by the Omicron variant.

“These are very preliminary results. This is before any publication, but we’re giving it out since we understand the urgency of the public to get any information possible about the fourth dose,” Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the Infection Prevention and Control Unit at Sheba Medical Center, told reporters during a virtual news conference Monday about the data.

“We have a follow-up of the Pfizer vaccine for two weeks now, and we have a follow-up of the Moderna vaccine just for one week at this time point. And what we see is that the Pfizer vaccine, after two weeks, you see an enhancement or increase in the number of antibodies and neutralizing antibodies — a pretty nice increase. It’s even a little bit higher than what we had after the third dose,” Regev-Yochay said. “Yet, this is probably not enough for the Omicron.”

Read more at CNN.

Politicians rarely set out to piss off their constituents, much less admit to doing so. So when French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his desire to antagonize France’s unvaccinated citizens into receiving COVID vaccinations, observers and many of his rivals were appalled, and some were a bit confused. Macron is up for reelection in April, and a quarter of his country remains unimmunized.

But what looked like a risky move for Macron could prove to be a more politically shrewd calculation, not because of whom it alienates, but rather because of whom it doesn’t. In France, and in other democratic countries around the world, the unvaccinated make up a relatively small segment of the population. Macron and his peers in countries such as Australia and Italy have calculated that condemning this group could be more politically effective than pandering to it. Even world-famous celebrities such as tennis star Novak Djokovic, whose unvaccinated status dashed his hopes of defending his Australian Open title, have become the targets of politicians’ ire. By taking a tougher line on the unvaccinated, Macron and other democratically elected leaders facing elections this year may be courting an energetic new voter base: the vaccinated, and ever more impatient, majority.

Read more at The Atlantic.

New research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health officials in California and New York indicates that a prior case of Covid-19 protected people from infection better than vaccinations did during the delta wave last summer and fall.

The findings, published Wednesday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, appear to contradict public health messaging that pushes vaccinations.

But experts maintain that the shots remain the safest way to protect against the most dire consequences of Covid. Even during the height of the delta wave last summer, virtually all hospitalized Covid patients were unvaccinated.

“Vaccines continue to reduce a person’s risk of contracting the virus that causes Covid-19 and are highly effective at preventing severe illness,” Benjamin Silk, one of the study’s authors and an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the CDC, said during a call with reporters Wednesday.

The new research is based on analyses of Covid infections among more than 1.1 million adults in California and New York from May to November last year.

Read more at NBC News.

Americans’ opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines are largely wrong.

We persist in thinking they should prevent all SARS-CoV-2 infections, but given the biology of the virus and the way our immune systems respond to either infection or vaccination that does not happen. 

As with other vaccines, the goal is to prevent serious and deadly outcomes, not to prevent all cases of transmission and infection.

Read more at USA Today.

Many mild, adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine, such as headaches and fatigue, could be attributed to a negative version of the placebo effect, a group of researchers suggests. 

In a study published today (January 18) in JAMA Network Open, scientists found that, in placebo-controlled COVID-19 clinical trials, 35 percent of placebo recipients reported adverse side effects compared to 46 percent of vaccine recipients after one vaccine dose. After two doses, 32 percent of placebo recipients reported side effects compared to 61 percent of vaccine recipients. For placebo recipients, headache, fatigue, and arm pain were the most common side effects reported.  

The placebo effect typically refers to beneficial effects of a drug that derive from the recipient’s expectations of its effects rather than its biochemistry. The effect can also work in reverse, causing adverse effects comparable to known effects, a phenomenon called the “nocebo” effect.

Read more at The Scientist.

When he has small slices of free time, wedged in between schoolwork and studying for academic quiz competitions, Arin Parsa scrolls through Reddit.

The 14-year-old from San Jose searches for posts about vaccines, and comments whenever he thinks he can be helpful, sometimes sharing a public health department’s hotline or congratulating a poster on overcoming a fear of needles. Last fall, Arin, who founded an organization called Teens for Vaccines, spotted a post from a 16-year-old in Ohio who said his parents were opposed to the COVID-19 shot.

“Can i get vaccinated without my parents’ consent?” the boy wrote.

No, not in Ohio, Arin responded, before adding a note of encouragement — “You aren’t alone” — and sharing a link to a guide he helped create for teens hoping to persuade their parents to let them get vaccinated. A couple of tips from the guide include talking to your parents when they seem relaxed, and emailing them information so they can look over it when they’re less busy.

Read more at The Los Angeles Times.

A new study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases on January 13, 2022, shows that influenza vaccination ‘was associated’ with protecting children against serious flu illness, even when infected with a flu virus that was different from the vaccine’s targeted virus.

In this limited study of 159 critically ill children, the researchers estimated that vaccination effectively reduced life-threatening influenza illness by 75% during a season predominated by B/Victoria viruses and A/H1N1pdm09 subclade viruses that were antigenically drifted from vaccine components. 

Vaccination was estimated to reduce the risk of critical influenza in children by 78% against H1N1pdm09 viruses expressing matched hemagglutinin proteins and 47% against mismatched viruses.

Against antigenically drifted B-Victoria viruses, vaccination conferred an estimated 75% protection.

Read more at Precision Vaccinations.

January 9, 2022

Parents are finding themselves as the targets of antivaxx misinformation and this was confirmed by a recent study that was done. While there have always been people out there who are considered “antivaxx,” the conversations about vaccines and children have really taken a turn during the current pandemic. With COVID-19 vaccines rolling out across the country, and the world, there is a slew of misinformation out there about the vaccine. This misinformation has been around during the whole pandemic, but vaccine misinformation could be dangerous and could prevent a child from getting something that is important for their health.

According to Scary Mommy, a new study has come out that shows that antivaxx misinformation campaigns are targeting parents of children the most, and they may be preying on the fear and hesitation parents have in regards to the health of their children.

Read more at Moms.

January 14, 2022

Should I vaccinate my children or not? Millions of parents are asking themselves this question as children return to school amid an unprecedented spike in coronavirus cases fueled by highly contagious omicron variant. But it’s not a new question, and the lessons learned 286 years ago by one of the nation’s founders, Benjamin Franklin, offer a resounding answer for parents in 2021: Vaccinate your children.

Franklin was a longtime champion of variolation — as the primitive form of vaccination was then called — against smallpox, the deadly virus of his era. Franklin embraced the scientific advances of the Enlightenment, and as publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette he thought it was his civic duty to warn the citizens of Philadelphia about the virus and encourage them to take variolation. As early as 1730, his newspaper announced that a smallpox epidemic in Boston had killed a third of its victims, while observing that only those who had been inoculated had survived.

While this claim was factual, the Gazette’s pro-variolation stance was controversial. Primitive by contemporary standards, variolation placed live smallpox virus into the bloodstream of a healthy individual. Fluid was taken from the pox of a sufferer and scratched into the arm or thigh of the inoculant. (Contemporary vaccines contain the cells of dead viruses, but in the Colonial era physicians had no choice but to use live virus.) Several days of illness usually followed, but most inoculants survived and achieved permanent immunity.

Read more at The Washington Post.