November 28, 2021

Moderna’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Burton said Sunday the vaccine maker could roll out a reformulated vaccine against the omicron coronavirus variant early next year.

It’s not clear whether new formulations will be needed, or if current Covid vaccinations will provide protection against the new variant that has begun to spread around the globe.

“We should know about the ability of the current vaccine to provide protection in the next couple of weeks, but the remarkable thing about the MRNA vaccines, Moderna platform is that we can move very fast,” Burton said on BBC’s “Andrew Marr Show.”

“If we have to make a brand new vaccine I think that’s going to be early 2022 before that’s really going to be available in large quantities,” the Moderna chief added.

Read more at CNBC.

December 1, 2021

The state of the digital Covid vaccine card — the bar code that we store on our phones and present to businesses and venues as proof of inoculation — is chaotic.

While some states, like California and New York, accept digital records as proof of vaccination to allow entry into restaurants and other businesses, states like Alabama, Arkansas and Florida have banned their use. That means anyone who plans to travel in the United States this holiday season has to research the policies at the destination.

Yet it’s indisputable that a digital card is far more convenient than a physical record. For many, the thought of misplacing a paper record may induce great anxiety, so it’s nice to have our inoculation data on devices that we carry everywhere. And companies like Apple and Google have come up with convenient ways to store and retrieve our vaccine credentials.

Read more at The New York Times.

December 2, 2021

Facebook has sold ads promoting anti-vaccine messages, comparing the US government’s response to Covid-19 to Nazi Germany, casting doubt on the result of the 2020 election, and even pushing political violence.

The ads have been run by merchandise companies that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook over the last few years.

On Monday, Fox News personality Lara Logan caused outrage by comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to a notorious Nazi doctor known as the “Angel of Death” — around the same time ads were running on Facebook promoting a sweater emblazed with the words, “I’m originally from America but I currently reside in 1941 Germany.”

Another ad compared the rollout of vaccines to the Holocaust — falsely and ludicrously implying they are part of an attempt to slaughter people on a mass scale.

Read more at CNN.

December 1, 2021

JOHANNESBURG — The detection of the Omicron variant in Africa signals the next stage of the battle against Covid-19: getting many more people inoculated in poorer nations where vaccines have been scarcest in order to deter new mutations from developing.

But while world leaders sometimes talk about this as if it were largely a matter of delivering doses overseas, the experience of South Africa, at least, hints at a far more complex set of challenges.

Like many poor countries, South Africa was made to wait months for vaccines as wealthier countries monopolized them. Many countries still do not have anywhere near enough doses to inoculate their populations.

The problems have not ended as shots began arriving in greater numbers.

Read more at The New York Times.

November 30, 2021

As an obstetrician, I know first-hand the highs and lows that women experience when having a baby. It can be hugely rewarding for many and a daunting experience for some. Over the past months, the pandemic has added a great deal of uncertainty to the experience of pregnant women and those considering becoming parents.

We know how dangerous the virus can be for pregnant women. The data published over recent months has been heartbreaking. Between July and October in England, one in five Covid patients receiving NHS treatment through a special lung-bypass machine were pregnant women who had not had their first jab. Around one in five women who are hospitalised with the virus need to be delivered preterm to help them recover – and one in five of their babies need care in the neonatal unit. New data from England shows that of those pregnant women in hospital with Covid, 98% are unvaccinated.

Read more at The Guardian.

December 1, 2021

Even as Americans are trying to prepare for omicron, many parts of the country are still reeling from the delta variant. More Americans died of COVID this year than in 2020, despite the wide availability of free vaccines. The pandemic’s lingering, deadly grip has left many frustrated. We hear from viewers about how the continued spread of the virus has impacted them.

Read more at PBS.

November 30, 2021

The new omicron variant of the coronavirus hasn’t yet been detected in the United States. But many epidemiologists say it’s a question of when, not if, it will arrive, as other prominent strains of COVID-19 have over the past two years. 

Colorado identified the delta variant in May of this year, soon after it was first found in the U.S. About six months later, it now accounts for all of the cases here, and has created a stress on hospitals and healthcare workers that is affecting patients, showing the potential for mutations of COVID-19 to disrupt life in Colorado.

To buy time to learn more about omicron’s transmissibility and how it might fare against COVID-19 vaccines, the U.S. has limited travel from some of the countries where the variant has been detected. CPR spoke to public health experts in Colorado to learn how the state will know when omicron arrives here, and what can be done to contain its spread.

Read more at CPR.

November 30, 2021

A letter set to go up for auction this week shows that ruler Catherine the Great was one of the early proponents of inoculation against disease.

The letter provides a glimpse into the empress’ concern about the smallpox epidemic, which was devastating Europe at the time. In correspondence with a Russian army officer dated April 20, 1787, she wrote about the urgency of protecting the general population against smallpox using a technique now considered a precursor to vaccination.

“Count Piotr Aleksandrovich, among the other duties of the Welfare Boards in the Provinces entrusted to you, one of the most important should be the introduction of inoculation against smallpox, which, as we know, causes great harm, especially among the ordinary people,” Catherine wrote, according to a translation from the London-based auction house MacDougall’s.

“Such inoculation should be common everywhere, and it is now all the more convenient, since there are doctors or medical attendants in nearly all districts, and it does not call for huge expenditure.”

Read more at CNN.

December 2, 2021

Researchers in Botswana and South Africa just detected the omicron variant a few weeks ago, but already many scientists are predicting that the efficacy of the vaccines will likely take a hit, probably a big hit, when it comes to stopping infections of omicron. And more breakthrough infections will likely occur if (and that’s a big if) omicron spreads here in the U.S.

At the same time, there’s hope that vaccines will still offer good protection against severe disease and hospitalization, especially with a third dose.

Read more at NPR.

November 29, 2021

Many of the world’s richest countries have spent the past year hoarding coronavirus vaccines, buying up enough doses to vaccinate their populations several times over and consistently failing to deliver on their promises to share doses with the developing world. The World Health Organization said the approach was “self-defeating” and “immoral.”It might be starting to bite. A new and potentially more transmissible variant of the virus likely emerged from a region with low vaccination rates.The new variant, known as Omicron, was first identified in South Africa, although it is unclear whether it originated there or whether it was brought into the country from elsewhere in the region.

What scientists do know is that the virus is much more likely to mutate in places where vaccination is low and transmission high.

“It has probably emerged in another country and has been detected in South Africa, which has very, very good genomic sequencing capacity and capability … it might well be a consequence of an outbreak, probably in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where there’s not a huge amount of genomic surveillance going on and vaccination rate is low,” Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, told CNN in a phone interview.

Head said the emergence of new variants was “a natural consequence of being too slow to vaccinate the world.”

Read more at CNN.