January 7, 2022

In anticipation of Colorado’s State Assembly session commencing next week, Rep. Kim Ransom (R-Lone Tree) announced to state Senate Minority leader Chris Holbert (R-Parker) on talk radio Monday that she will introduce a recycled version of her bill from last year’s legislative session which would ban discrimination based on vaccine status.

Last year’s House Bill 21-1191, titled “Prohibit Discrimination COVID-19 Vaccine Status: Concerning the prohibition against discrimination based on the refusal to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine, was postponed indefinitely –or “killed”– late in the session by the House Health & Insurance Committee on a party-line vote.

Ransom says she will introduce a similar bill this session, with some changes in the statute language.

Democrats will control the majority in the House and committees — as they did in last year’s session — prompting questions as to whether the bill can succeed without substantial changes to appease Democratic concerns.

Ransom’s bill from the 2021 legislative session proposed sanctions against employers who would punish applicants or employees for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, to include licensed health facilities. It extended the protections against discrimination clients and patrons of government agencies, private businesses, and health insurers.

Read more at Colorado Times Recorder.

January 13, 2022

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers, dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as coronavirus cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise.

But in a modest victory for President Biden, the court allowed a more limited mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated.

The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with the liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority.

The employer decision undercut one of President Biden’s most significant attempts to tame the virus and left the country with a patchwork of state laws and policies, largely leaving companies and businesses on their own.

The president welcomed the ruling in his favor, saying in a statement that it would save the lives of health care workers and patients. But he said he was disappointed that the court had overturned the employer mandate, which he said was “grounded squarely in both science and the law.”

Read more at The New York Times.

January 12, 2022

As the Omicron variant spreads like wildfire across the United States, it’s likely just about everybody will be exposed to the strain, but vaccinated people will still fare better, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert said Tuesday.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”

In contrast, those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” he added.

Omicron devastates services, schools, travel as workers are sick or in quarantineAcross the United States, at least one in five eligible Americans — roughly 65 million people– are not vaccinated against Covid-19. More than 62% of the country has been fully vaccinated, but only 23% are fully vaccinated and boosted, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read more at CNN.

January 11, 2022

Colorado kids are getting back on track with their routine vaccinations, but lower rates over the last two years could still give diseases like measles an opening.

In the first month of the pandemic, from mid-March 2020 to mid-April 2020, new vaccinations dropped about 38% compared to the same period in 2019, according to data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Kids started to catch up in the following months, but from mid-March 2021 to late October 2021, shots were still down 7% compared to 2019.

“Staying up-to-date on routine vaccinations is critical especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The last thing we want is an outbreak of any kind, especially when it’s easily preventable,” Heather Roth, the state health department’s immunization branch chief, said in a news release.

Vaccination rates have dropped across the country and worldwide, giving viruses more potential hosts and chances to spread, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, an infectious disease pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado. While diseases like measles no longer circulate in the United States under normal circumstances, they’re more common in other parts of the world, and unvaccinated travelers could bring them back, he said.

Read more at The Denver Post.

The world’s most widely used COVID-19 vaccines provide little to no protection against infection with the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, laboratory evidence suggests.

Inactivated-virus vaccines contain SARS-CoV-2 particles that have been chemically treated to make it impossible for them to cause an infection. Stable and relatively easy to manufacture, such vaccines have been distributed widely as part of China’s global vaccine diplomacy, helping them to become the jab of choice in many countries. But a multitude of experiments show that they are consistently hobbled by Omicron.

Many people who receive two jabs of an inactivated vaccine fail to produce immune molecules that can counter Omicron transmission. And even after a third dose of an inactivated vaccine, an individual’s levels of ‘neutralizing’ antibodies, which provide a potent safeguard against viral infection of cells, tend to remain low. A third shot of another type of vaccine, such as those based on messenger RNA or purified proteins, seems to offer better protection against Omicron.

Read more at Nature.

Suspicion, misinformation, complacency and delays because of the holidays and bad weather have combined to produce alarmingly low COVID-19 vaccination rates in U.S. children ages 5 to 11, authorities say.

As of Tuesday, just over 17% were fully vaccinated, more than two months after shots for the age group became available. While Vermont is at 48%, California is just shy of 19% and Mississippi is only at 5%.

Vaccinations among the elementary school set surged after the shots were introduced in the fall, but the numbers have crept up slowly since then, and omicron’s explosive spread appears to have had little effect.

Read more at NBC Today.

If, just a few years ago, someone had written a sci-fi story about a global pandemic in which a significant portion of the population refused to take the vaccine that would save their lives, it would’ve been dismissed as too far-fetched. And yet, here we are, well into that dystopian future.

As of this writing (mid-January 2022), the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has exceeded 800,000, with no sign of the virus abating. Despite the ready availability of effective vaccines, nearly a third of Americans still haven’t gotten inoculated. What accounts for this vaccine hesitancy?

In part, it’s due to “anti-vaxxer” conspiracy theories. False claims, such as the notion that childhood vaccines causing autism, have been rampant on social media. So, if you’ve bought into this misinformation and already have doubts about vaccine safety, it’s understandable why you’d have misgivings about the COVID shot as well.

Read more at Psychology Today.

COVID-19 can strike hard and fast — especially when you are pregnant. Alison Cahill, a specialist in maternal–fetal medicine at the Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, vividly remembers a patient from the first wave of the pandemic who was 26 weeks pregnant and woke up one morning with a cough. Her condition declined so rapidly that she was admitted to hospital that evening. Within six hours, she had been transferred to the intensive-care unit (ICU), where she was sedated so that she could be placed on a heart–lung bypass machine. Owing to safety precautions, her husband had to communicate with the medical team from the parking area.

“When she woke up and started to not feel very well, I don’t think it was within her wildest dreams that by the next morning she would be sedated and by herself in an ICU,” Cahill says. The woman spent a few weeks in the unit before she was finally able to go home.

Health-care professionals were still sharing similar gut-wrenching stories when the Delta variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 hit the United States. Cahill’s hospital, for example, was flooded with so many people who rapidly became ill with COVID-19 that the staff had to convert other floors into extra ICUs. But there was one stark difference: COVID-19 vaccines were now readily available. And all of Cahill’s critically ill pregnant patients had refused one.

Read more at Nature.

Parents today have the option to protect their kids from cancer with just two quick jabs. The HPV vaccine prevents nine different strains of human papillomavirus, or HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that can cause a range of different cancers, from cervical to penile. Since the vaccine’s approval in 2006, rates of cervical cancer, the fourth most common cancer in women, have steadily dropped. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that all kids between 11 and 12 years of age receive the HPV vaccine — or anyone as old as 26 who is not already vaccinated. But what about the HPV vaccine for adults past their mid-20s? Is there a hard and fast HPV vaccine age limit? Does the HPV vaccine help if you’re already infected?

For most adults, the HPV vaccine won’t have much benefit — but there are exceptions.

Read more at Fatherly.

Early on in the pandemic, many of us hoped that India would help vaccinate the world. India’s pharmaceutical sector, dominated by companies capable of churning out generic medicines in vast quantities, looked like the obvious location for vaccine production at the scale needed to inoculate the developing world.

That hasn’t worked out, partly because the Indian government restricted vaccine exports after the Delta variant emerged here — but also because of the unexpected and early success of the mRNA-based shots from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. These came on the market early and set high standards for efficacy against the original variant of the virus. But they were remarkably ill-suited for production and distribution in the emerging world. They need to be stored at untenably low temperatures, and their novel and unfamiliar production process isn’t easy to replicate.

Given their effectiveness as the mainstay of rich-world vaccination programs, it isn’t surprising that, on the infrequent occasions that the West thinks about vaccines for developing countries, the focus is on how to expand mRNA’s footprint. The emergence of Delta and then the Omicron variant — against which booster mRNA shots seem to work better than many alternatives — has led some to the conclusion that, unless the entire world switches to mRNA, effective global vaccination is impossible. Certainly, that’s what both activists and rich-country policy makers seem to think.

Read more at The Washington Post.