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.

Though vaccines have restored some semblance of pre-pandemic life for most people in the United States, one group is still waiting: kids under five, who are not yet eligible for the COVID-19 vaccines. That’s been particularly frustrating for their parents, who must decide what activities are safe for their unvaccinated children—and who are often left scrambling when outbreaks shut down schools and daycare.

Compared to adults, children in this age group are less at risk for severe COVID-19. But currently the coronavirus’s Omicron variant is driving a surge in pediatric hospitalizations—more than double that of the previous peak in the fall—because it’s more transmissible than earlier strains.

Elizabeth Lloyd, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, says it’s hard to tease out how many children were hospitalized for COVID-19 versus for other reasons. “But from my experience, we’re definitely seeing more kids who are sick and who are sometimes needing ICU-level care,” she says. “This is something we’re hoping with this [children’s] vaccine could be preventable.”

Read more at National Geographic.

Now that the Supreme Court has blocked enforcement of a federal mandate requiring millions of workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine, businesses must weigh how to move forward. 

Some companies are pressing ahead with a vaccine requirement. Others are putting such mandates on pause, and still others may be breathing a sigh of relief that they don’t have to impose a policy that could turn off prospective hires in a tight job market.   

Read more at USA Today.

Vaccine boosters provide robust protection against severe disease from the omicron variant in the United States, according to three reports released Friday that offer the first real-world data in this country showing the utility of the additional shots in keeping vaccinated people out of the hospital.

But the reports by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are arriving late to the winter surge in coronavirus cases that have choked the corridors of hospitals across much of the country.

When omicron was first identified in late November and began spreading rapidly in the United States, millions of vaccinated people lined up for the extra shots. But that has slowed. To date, 39 percent of fully vaccinated people have gotten the additional doses, according to the CDC. Some people may not be eligible for another shot if enough time has not elapsed since their most recent one.

Read more at The Washington Post.

A new study adds to growing evidence that there is no connection between Covid-19 vaccinations and a reduced chance of conceiving.

Rather, couples in the study had slightly lower chances of conception if the male partner had been infected with the coronavirus within 60 days — which offers even more reason to get vaccinated against Covid-19, since the illness could affect male fertility in the short term, according to the study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

“These findings indicate that male SARS-CoV-2 infection may be associated with a short-term decline in fertility and that COVID-19 vaccination does not impair fertility in either partner,” Amelia Wesselink and her fellow researchers — from the Boston University School of Public Health and other institutions across the United States — wrote in the study. SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that causes Covid-19.

“This adds to the evidence from animal studies, studies of humans undergoing fertility treatment, and the COVID-19 vaccine trials, none of which found an association between COVID-19 vaccination and lower fertility,” the researchers wrote. “Similarly, several studies have documented no appreciable association between COVID-19 vaccination and miscarriage risk.”