Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant that appears better able to evade immunity, and that seasonal wave could end up a tsunami.

Back in July, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced that COVID had become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” an unfortunate turn of phrase that was soon picked up by the president. Now the flaws in its logic are about to be exposed on what could be a terrifying scale. Unvaccinated Americans will certainly pay the steepest price in the months to come, but the risks appear to have grown for everyone. The pandemic of the vaccinated can no longer be denied.

The 60 percent of Americans who are fully vaccinated could soon find their lives looking very different. For much of the summer and fall, those who had received two Pfizer or Moderna doses or one Johnson & Johnson shot were told that they were essentially bulletproof, especially if they were young and healthy. But preliminary data from South Africa and Europe now suggest that two vaccine doses alone might still allow for frequent breakthrough infections and rapid spread of the disease—even if hospitalization and death remain unlikely. Getting three shots, or two shots plus a previous bout of COVID, seems to offer more protection. For Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, that’s enough evidence to justify changing the CDC’s definition of full vaccination. “With Omicron and the data emerging, I think there is no reason why we shouldn’t have a pretty strong push for everyone to have boosters,” he told me.

Read more at The Atlantic.

December 9, 2021

The world has “lost the plot” on equitable vaccine access during the coronavirus pandemic and is falling far short of targets to vaccinate the global south, according to scathing assessments from experts as the omicron variant spreads to more countries.

From the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization [WHO] and several other public health groups have argued the only way out of the pandemic is to vaccinate the entire world.

But McGill University professor in the departments of epidemiology and biostatistics, Madhukar Pai, said the initial response to the omicron variant proved we were a long way from that goal.

“The world has totally lost the plot on this pandemic,” he told NPR.

“Especially after the Delta variant pretty much decimated India, we knew allowing this virus to rip unchecked through populations was a disastrous idea. Because new variants will come [and] mutations will happen if billions of virus particles are manufactured in millions of people.

Read more at NPR.

December 9, 2021

As Covid-19 began spreading in early 2020, one of Linfa Wang’s first ideas was to test the blood of people who’d survived a previous coronavirus outbreak. The virologist, who works out of Duke-NUS Medical School, a collaboration between Duke and the National University of Singapore, has been studying bat-borne viruses for decades. He’d helped show that SARS-CoV-1, which killed almost 800 people in 2003, likely jumped to humans from horseshoe bats. Wang’s new theory was that people who’d recovered from the original SARS might harbor antibodies that could help fight the new one, SARS-CoV-2.

Initially, the experiment was a bust. The patients Wang tested had antibodies only against the older version of SARS. But as a number of Covid variants began spreading early this year, he decided to test the patients again. By this point, many of the Singaporean SARS survivors had also been vaccinated against Covid, providing a rare set of immune systems that had been exposed to proteins from these related coronaviruses.

Read more at Bloomberg News.

December 9, 2021

The United States reached a significant milestone late Wednesday, with more than 200 million people now fully vaccinated against the coronavirus — about 60 percent of the population.

In the past week, an average of 1.92 million doses per day were administered — a 35 percent increase over the week before — according to data from The Washington Post’s tracker.

However, the achievement comes as the nation’s tallies of daily deaths and new cases rose in the past week and hospitalization rates jumped by 10 percent. The looming threat of the newly identified omicron variant of the coronavirus also hangs over the country as it enters the holiday season.

Omicron cases have been detected in 21 states so far, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker, most recently in Texas on Wednesday.

The World Health Organization, drug companies and U.S. health officials have so far said omicron may prove more transmissible than previous variants but potentially cause milder cases of covid-19. However, they have issued strong caveats, saying the data is preliminary and research is ongoing to find out more about the variant, with no firm conclusions yet drawn.

Read more at The Washington Post.

December 10, 2021

Misinformation is tightening its stranglehold on the American psyche. My 9-year-old daughter, Sonia, knows no other world than one where truth and fiction are often indistinguishable. That’s the reality for a generation well-versed with social media and the internet.

This stranglehold is not a looming threat — it’s affecting children right now. Most parents, including many who accepted other childhood vaccines, are hesitant or outright opposed to vaccinating their children against Covid-19. This is despite sound evidence that vaccines are safe and effective and recent endorsements from the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are 28 million children 5-11 years old now eligible for the Pfizer vaccine, and 16.7% of them have been vaccinated. Now is an opportunity to teach these children to thrive — not just in a world where Covid-19 poses a constant threat, but in one dominated by misinformation.

Read more at STAT News.

December 10, 2021

LONDON — In England, the prime minister now talks about compulsory vaccinations, just six months after proclaiming “Freedom Day” from coronavirus restrictions. In Germany, the new chancellor has endorsed barring unvaccinated people from much of public life. Next door, in Austria, the unvaccinated will remain confined to their homes, even after the government lifts a lockdown on Sunday.

Across Europe’s democracies, the latest wave of the pandemic is prompting governments to reimpose sweeping restrictions on free movement and mixing in their societies. Only this time, many of the rules single out those who are not vaccinated. That has stirred angry street protests and rekindled a searing debate over how much countries should curtail individual liberties in the name of public health.

Read more at The New York Times.

December 10, 2021

Only about one in 10 Americans say that receiving the Covid-19 vaccine would violate their religious beliefs, while about 60 percent say that too many people are using religion as an excuse to avoid vaccine mandates, according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core.

A majority of Americans are critical of religious exemptions and say that the vaccines do not violate their own religious beliefs or the teachings of their religion, and that there are no valid religious reasons to refuse the Covid-19 vaccine.

The survey indicates a sharp divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans. That gap widens along partisan lines. More than 80 percent of vaccinated Democrats say they are angry at those who refuse to get vaccinated, and similar numbers of unvaccinated Republicans are “angry at those who think they have the right to tell me to get vaccinated against Covid-19.” Less than half of vaccinated Republicans and unvaccinated Democrats say they are angry along such lines.

About one in five Americans say that vaccination has caused major conflict within their families.

Read more at The New York Times.

December 5, 2021

(NEXSTAR) – As a new variant of COVID-19 starts to spread around the world, the Centers for Disease Control is encouraging all adults to get a booster shot as soon as they’re eligible. But what if you’ve just boosted your immunity the hard way by recovering from the virus?

The answer comes down to the debate between natural immunity and immunity garnered from the coronavirus vaccines.

“Immunity after a breakthrough case is imperfect,” David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in an interview with Verywell Health. Immunity from the vaccine is more reliable and may last longer than protection someone has after recovering from the virus, studies show.

Read more at KDVR.

December 9, 2021

The Senate voted Wednesday night to repeal President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on private businesses with over 100 employees by a vote of 52-48.

Two Democrats crossed party lines and voted with all Republicans present to repeal the mandate.

Both Democratic “yes” votes, cast by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. and Jon Tester, D-Mont., were expected.

Republicans brought up the repeal for a vote using a procedural tool called the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn rules created by federal agencies and only requires 51 votes to pass the Senate.

It’s unclear if the Senate-passed repeal will be brought up in the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is not required to bring it up for a floor vote, and at least 218 signatures would be needed to force consideration. Even then, if the House were to pass it, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday that Biden would veto it should it land on his desk.

Read more at ABC News.

December 9, 2021

DENVER — While the vast majority of state employees have revealed they’re vaccinated against COVID-19, a few thousand hold-outs have decided to keep their status secret and opt for biweekly testing under state rules, an analysis by 9Wants to Know has found. 

Out of approximately 28,000 state employees under the governor’s vaccination rules, about 16% are either unvaccinated or they haven’t revealed their status. 

A review of employee vaccine data from the Department of Personnel Administration by 9Wants to Know found among agencies, the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has the highest non-attest rate at 32%, or about one out of three employees. 

“It’s hard to put it down to one thing. We certainly hear different reasons why,” CDOT spokesperson Matt Inzeo said of the unknown reason why his agency has the highest rate. “We’ve been strongly encouraging everyone to get vaccinated.” 

Read more at 9News.