Although the vaccine for human papillomavirus, or HPV, was first recommended for use in adolescents in the United States in 2006, immunization rates have lagged behind other childhood vaccines, with just 54% of 13- to 17-year-olds fully vaccinated in 2019. A new study finds that the rate of HPV vaccination improves, however, when adolescents are allowed to give consent to be vaccinated.

In Washington, D.C., and eight demographically and politically diverse states where adolescents have been permitted to obtain the HPV vaccine without parental consent, researchers found that initial vaccination rates were higher from 2015 through 2018: 68% of teens had initiated the multidose series, versus 61% in places where parental consent was needed.

Teens also had completed the series more often where they’d been allowed to consent independently: 54% were fully vaccinated compared with 48% in places requiring parental consent, though the difference was not statistically significant. The national study sample included nearly 82,000 teens between 13 and 17 years old.

For Dr. Sangini Sheth, study co-author and associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, the findings not only point to a possible avenue to improve HPV vaccination rates through public policy change, but also signal the need to further explore adolescents’ ability to reasonably give consent for certain health care services, as well as the individual and public health benefits at stake.

Read more at US News and World.

School vaccine mandates go back 200 years. They’ve defeated many legal challenges. Will they work for COVID?

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The vaccination of 5- to 11-year-olds against COVID-19 is well underway. California has become the first state to announce that it will add this vaccine to its list of shots that are required for all schoolchildren, and a handful of districts around the country are making similar moves. NPR’s Anya Kamenetz reports that this kind of mandate goes back nearly two centuries, but it has always drawn pushback.

ANYA KAMENETZ, BYLINE: In 1827, Boston became the first city in the United States to require children entering school to be vaccinated; in this case, against smallpox. Inoculation was almost like a miracle. This was a disease that once killed nearly 1 out of 3 patients. But Elena Conis, a historian of medicine at the University of California, Berkeley, said…

ELENA CONIS: Vaccines have been controversial since the very first vaccine was developed against smallpox. And vaccination became increasingly problematic or increasingly controversial when states began to make it mandatory.

Read more at NPR.

Health experts are urging parents to continue to get their children vaccinated after at least four separate incidents across the country where children were given the incorrect COVID-19 vaccine dosages.

The incorrect dosages were isolated incidents and did not cause adverse health effects in children, some experts say.

On Tuesday, a second Virginia pharmacy was removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs after it incorrectly administered the COVID-19 vaccine formulated for individuals 12 years and older to 25 children ages 5 to 11 years old, according to the Fairfax County Health Department.

In other incidents, 98 students at a vaccine clinic in Montgomery County, Maryland, were incorrectly given a diluted dose, the local health department reported this week. And in California, 14 children were given the wrong amount of the COVID-19 vaccine on Saturday.

The incidents have happened in the weeks since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 in the United States.

In several of the reported cases, children received a smaller dose of the vaccine than what is recommended.

Read more at ABC News.

Nearly 10 percent of children ages 5 to 11 have received their first coronavirus vaccine dose, just two weeks into the immunization campaign for the 28 million youngAmericans in that age group, Jeff Zients, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, said on Wednesday.

That represents a faster uptake thanwhen adults were initially offered coronavirus vaccine shots about a year ago, he added. “For perspective, it took about 50 days for us to reach 10 percent of adults with one shot,” he said.

There are at least eight times as many adults as there are kids in the 5-11 age group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zients, speaking to reporters alongside the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, said that since injections began this month for kids younger than 12, about 2.6 million of them had received their first shot.

Read more at The Washington Post.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration, under pressure to increase the supply of coronavirus vaccines to poor nations, plans to spend billions of dollars to expand manufacturing capacity, with the goal of producing at least one billion additional doses a year beginning in the second half of 2022.

The investment is part of a new plan, announced Wednesday by White House officials, for the government to partner with industry to address immediate vaccine needs in the United States and overseas and to prepare for future pandemics. It comes on top of recent decisions to buy enough of Pfizer’s new Covid-19 pill for about 10 million courses of treatment, and to spend $3 billion on rapid over-the-counter tests, which are needed to detect the virus early enough for the Pfizer drug to work.

Taken together, the moves amount to an expansive new effort to control the pandemic at a time when Americans are desperate for normalcy and caseloads are creeping up with winter’s approach.

In another development that the White House hopes will reassure the public, the Food and Drug Administration is likely to approve requests from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to offer booster shots to everyone 18 and older.

Read more at The New York Times.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized Moderna’s and Pfizer’s Covid booster shots for all U.S. adults Friday — two months later than the Biden administration had wanted to begin giving the extra doses — as growing data shows the efficacy of vaccines wanes over time.

The emergency use authorization comes after the companies in the last week submitted new data supporting the third doses. Scientists advising the FDA had rejected the administration’s original plans to start distributing boosters to all adults the week of Sept. 20, citing a lack of supporting data. Moderna resubmitted its application just two days ago.

FDA Acting Commissioner Janet Woodcock cleared the doses without the usual public meeting to review the new data. The companies announced the decision Friday morning.

“This emergency use authorization comes at a critical time as we enter the winter months and face increasing COVID-19 case counts and hospitalizations across the country,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.

Read more at CNBC News.

WESTMINSTER — Melissa Blatzer was determined to get her three children caught up on their routine immunizations on a recent Saturday morning at a walk-in clinic in this Denver suburb. It had been about a year since the kids’ last shots, a delay Blatzer chalked up to the pandemic.

Two-year-old Lincoln Blatzer, in his fleece dinosaur pajamas, waited anxiously in line for his hepatitis A vaccine. His siblings, 14-year-old Nyla Kusumah and 11-year-old Nevan Kusumah, were there for their TDAP, HPV and meningococcal vaccines, plus a COVID-19 shot for Nyla.

“You don’t have to make an appointment and you can take all three at once,” said Blatzer, who lives several miles away in Commerce City. That convenience outweighed the difficulty of getting everyone up early on a weekend.

Child health experts hope community clinics like this, along with the return to in-person classes, more well-child visits and the rollout of COVID shots for younger children, can help boost routine childhood immunizations, which dropped during the pandemic. Despite a rebound, immunization rates are still lower than in 2019, and disparities in rates between racial and economic groups, particularly for Black children, have been exacerbated.

Read more at the Denver Post.

For the last year and a half, Colorado’s children have missed out on so many things – from sports games to birthday parties, and from sleepovers to in-person learning. Children are resilient, but they shouldn’t face ongoing challenges without support. That’s why the early-November announcement that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is available for kids ages 5-11 is such good news for our community. Now that all school-aged children are eligible to be vaccinated, our kids can get back to the things they love — and most importantly, they can get back to being kids.

To help parents find resources and information about COVID-19 vaccines for children, the local public health partners in the Denver Metro Area — Boulder County Public Health, Broomfield Department of Public Health and Environment, Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, Jefferson County Public Health, Public Health Institute at Denver Health and Tri-County Health Department  — in partnership with Immunize Colorado are launching a new public information campaign. The campaign, which is called “COVID-19 Vaccines Help Kids Be Kids” and launches this week, features local pediatricians, family medicine providers and public health experts explaining the ins-and-outs of the vaccine, and why they support vaccination for children ages 5-11. In addition, the campaign features local parents sharing why they are choosing to get their own child vaccinated.

Read more at Edgewater Echo.

DENVER – Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order Thursday formalizing the state’s guidance that everyone age 18+ who meets the eligible timeframe to get a COVID-19 booster shot be allowed to get one — one day after saying the state would try to add 500 more hospital beds within the next month or two to prepare for a continuing surge of the virus.

The order declares the entire state of Colorado as being at high risk of exposure or transmission of COVID-19 and thus eligible for the booster shot.

“There are 1,492 individuals currently hospitalized due to COVID-19, and only 623 hospital beds remain unoccupied across the State,” the order says. “[Ninety-five percent] of Colorado’s intensive care beds are occupied and 94% of medical/surgical beds are occupied.”

The order essentially formalizes guidance under which the state has been operating since booster availability was expanded and which the Colorado Department of Public Health discussed earlier this week.

Read more at The Denver Channel.