Merriam-Webster just announced its Word of the Year. For some, it is a symbol of hope and health. For others, it’s a representation of a politicized issue.But as everyone can agree, the word is everywhere and it’s controversial.”Vaccine” is Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year. The word was selected based on lookup data, notable spikes, and year-over-year increases in searches.

“This is a word that has kind of two parallel but intersecting stories: one is a medical story, and one is a political story or a cultural story,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large.

This selection comes after “pandemic” was chosen in 2020, which informed top searches on the site and reshaped daily language, according to the company. The Oxford English Dictionary selected “vax” as their word of the year

“Vaccine” was selected, according to Merriam-Webster, because it is a promising medical solution which became a major source of political division. New research into vaccines led the company to revise and expand its entry for “vaccine” in May. An entry for “immune response,” in which cells behave as though a disease is present to train the body to fight it, was added separate from “immunity.”

Read more at CNN.

A risk-based strategy for adult hepatitis B (HepB) vaccination just hasn’t worked, according to Kevin A. Ault, MD, FACOG, FIDSA, the division director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Kansas Medical Center, in Kansas City.

“The risk-based strategy has been given over a decade to prove itself, and that hasn’t panned out because of the complex list of risk factors,” Dr. Ault told the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). 

The list for at-risk adults is indeed complex. There are four risks under those who might be exposed through sexual contact, such as having multiple partners or living with someone who is hepatitis B surface antigen–positive, and six under the category of those at risk from percutaneous or mucosal exposure to blood, such as injection drug users, those with diabetes and hemodialysis patients. In addition, there are “others”: those at risk because of HIV, chronic liver disease, hepatitis C virus (HCV), incarceration or international travel. And finally, there is a catchall—“all other persons seeking protection from HBV infection.”

Determining whether the patient in front of you should be vaccinated is challenging in the time constraints of an office or clinic visit, Dr. Ault said. It’s especially difficult because many patients do not report a risk, added Mark K. Weng, MD, MSc, FAAP, the lead of the ACIP’s Hepatitis Work Group.

Read more at Pharmacy Practice News.

As cases of Covid-19 rise throughout the U.S., health officials warn that an increasing number of fully vaccinated people are being hospitalized or going to the emergency room. The concern about waning immunity against severe Covid infection comes as the Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine booster shot for all adults 18 and older.

“What we’re starting to see now is an uptick in hospitalizations among people who’ve been vaccinated but not boosted,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Tuesday in an interview. “It’s a significant proportion, but not the majority by any means.”

On Wednesday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported a decline in vaccine effectiveness among the elderly and residents of long-term care facilities, many of whom were the first to be eligible to be vaccinated last winter.

“Although the highest risk are those people who are unvaccinated, we are seeing an increase in emergency department visits among adults 65 and older, which are now again higher than they are for younger age groups,” Walensky said Wednesday at a White House Covid briefing. 

Read more at NBC News.

White House tells businesses to move forward with vaccine mandate

For the second time in a month, the White House on Thursday urged large businesses to move forward with coronavirus vaccine mandates for their workforces despite court challenges to the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement for private companies.

“Our message to businesses right now is to move forward with measures that will make their workplaces safer and protect their workforces from COVID-19,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters during a briefing. “That was our message after the first stay issued by the Fifth Circuit. That remains our message and nothing has changed.”

Psaki’s comments came after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) said it would suspend enforcement of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for businesses after a federal appeals court reaffirmed its decision to suspend the mandate.

Psaki said Thursday that the administration remains confident that it has the authority to issue the rule, known as an emergency temporary standard, which requires businesses with more than 100 employees to require that their employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to regular testing for the virus.

Psaki also said the administration was still working off the Jan. 4 deadline it set for businesses to comply with the rule, despite the ongoing legal dispute.

Read more at The Hill.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital will test the safety and efficacy of a nasal vaccine aimed at preventing and slowing Alzheimer’s disease, the Boston hospital announced Tuesday. The start of the small, Phase I clinical trial comes after nearly 20 years of research led by Howard L. Weiner, MD, co-director of the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at the hospital.

The trial will include 16 participants between the ages of 60 and 85, all with early symptomatic Alzheimer’s but otherwise generally healthy. They will receive two doses of the vaccine one week apart, the hospital said in a press release. The participants will enroll from the Ann Romney Center. 

A Phase I clinical trial is designed to establish the safety and dosage for a potential new medication. If it goes well, a much larger trial would be needed to test its effectiveness.

The vaccine uses a substance called Protollin, which stimulates the immune system. “Protollin is designed to activate white blood cells found in the lymph nodes on the sides and back of the neck to migrate to the brain and trigger clearance of beta amyloid plaques — one of the hallmarks of AD [Alzheimer’s disease],” the hospital explains. It notes that Protollin has been found to be safe in other vaccines.

Read more at CBS News.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has warned that measles, a highly contagious and potentially deadly illness that spreads through respiratory droplets, could once again become a global threat after millions of children failed to get their measles vaccine during the pandemic. According to the CDC, 22.3 million infants around the world missed out on their first dose of the measles vaccine in 2020, leaving them susceptible to measles and increasing the potential for an outbreak.

Since 2000, measles vaccination has prevented an estimated 31.7 million deaths around the world, according to the CDC. But recent waning vaccination rates could weaken global efforts to eradicate the disease. “Increased population susceptibility and suboptimal measles surveillance portend an immediate elevated risk for measles transmission and outbreaks, threatening the already fragile progress toward regional elimination goals,” the CDC wrote in a recent progress report regarding efforts to eliminate measles worldwide.

Despite more countries offering measles immunization in 2020 compared to 2000, the number of children who went unvaccinated still climbed, likely due to the global coronavirus pandemic’s impact on health-care-seeking behavior. According to the CDC, the number of infants reported to have missed their measles vaccine in 2020 was 3 million more than the number reported in 2019. That’s the largest increase seen in nearly two decades, according to USA Today.

Read more in Romper.

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.