US scientists are divided by a proposal to give COVID vaccines yearly

The New Wave of COVID-19: Vaccination Fatigue and Implications for the Outbreaks of BA.5 in the United States

There is a new wave of Covid-19 in Europe as cool weather arrives with public health experts warn that vaccine fatigue and confusion over types of shots will limit booster usage.

The Omicron subvariant of BA.5 still holds the top spot in the US. It caused about 64% of new infections in the US last week, but it is quickly being outmatched by newer sublineages.

WHO data released late on Wednesday showed that cases in the European Union reached 1.5 million last week, up 8% from the prior week, despite a dramatic fall in testing. Globally, case numbers continue to decline.

In Italy, intensive care admissions rose about 21% compared to the week before, while Covid-19 hospital admissions with symptoms jumped nearly 32%.

Some meeting panellists had concerns about the decision to use a bivalent formulation, rather than an updated single-strain one, in future vaccines. There are few data on the effectiveness of bivalent vaccines when they are given as a primary series, particularly for young children, who make up a large proportion of people in the US. Studies point to the possibility that the vaccine’s effectiveness against Omicron could be adversely affected by including the ancestral strain.

One way to deal with vaccine fatigue is to target the people who are at the highest risk. Only 35% of people over age 65 have gotten an updated booster. Many of the deaths of COVID in the U.S. are among people in their 50’s.

The lack of a major publicity campaign and the fact that it is all over may make people less concerned about their risk, says a professor of European public health. On balance, I fear that it will be a bit lower.

Some scientists have also posited on social media that the surge in RSV hospitalizations might be the result of SARS-CoV-2 infection causing immune deficiencies that leave people more susceptible to other infections. Miller has not seen any evidence to support that, and the surge in hospitalizations could be a result of the large number of people who missed exposures over the past few years. There is more of a naive population that is at risk. So you’ve got more numbers going into the system.”

The European pandemic aviavi vaccine crisis: How does the NHS cope with Covid-19? A programme for the last few months, starting the Times

During the month of September, the weekly vaccine doses in the EU averaged between 1 million and 1.4 million, compared with 6 million per week in the year-ago period, ECDC data showed.

“I’ve almost had to remind people about influenza,” Schaffner said. “We’ve had two quite curtailed, very low influenza years. And of course, everyone’s been preoccupied with Covid, and they want to put Covid behind them and get on with their lives.”

Italy’s Gimbe science foundation said the government, soon to be replaced after an election, was ill prepared for the autumn-winter season, and highlighted that a publication on the government’s management of the pandemic had been blocked.

British officials last week warned of the potential for renewed flu and Covid-19 to put a strain on the already stretched National Health Service.

First, a programming note: This is my last newsletter before starting a book leave. I’ll be back in late January. I will read the work of other Times journalists while they are writing The Morning.

Vaccining the Covid-19 Composite Population: New Causes and Predictions for a New Phase of the Emerging Disease

VoCs arevariants of concern that could shake up the COVID COMPOSITION. The next year will see the emergence of new versions of the virus. A VoC designation will only be given if the variant is better at evading the immune system and causes more severe disease than the ones currently circulating. A new VoC must spur action to ensure that fully vaccinated people — especially those who are older or immunocompromised — receive booster doses.

In the United States, these are BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, BA.4.6, BA.2.75 and BA.2.75.2. The XBB variant has been rising in other countries and may be behind a new wave of cases in Singapore. Cases are also rising in Europe and the UK, where these variants have taken hold.

Dr. Peter Hotez thinks of them as Scrabble-alikes because they all use letters with high scores in the board game.

The White House said Thursday that this Covid-19 season does not have to be like last winter’s, when there was a large spike in cases with the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant.

In the last few weeks, the number of new infections caused by the BQs has doubled every 6 to seven days, compared to the same time last year.

Due to the rapid evolution of Covid-19, we are only able to get limited effective treatments for the immuno-suppressed.

Though they each descend from slightly different branches of the Omicron family tree, these new offshoots have evolved to share many of the same mutations, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.

Some experts think this means that we are entering a new phase of the evolution of the virus, one that will see circulation of several different types at the same time.

The professor at the Yale School of Public Health said that several co-circulating semi-dominate lineages were likely to go into the winter season.

“That’s because with convergent evolution, perhaps several different lineages can independently obtain similar transmissibility levels versus a single new variant taking over.

“This is what predominantly happens for most pathogens, such as the flu and RSV,” Grubaugh wrote in an email. “Now that the virus has adapted pretty well to human transmission, most of what is circulating has high fitness.”

Covid-19: A case study of genetic drift and new vaccination strategies for the era of global immunization and vaccination

Maria Van Kerkhove, the Covid-19 response technical lead for the World Health Organization, said Wednesday that the large mix of new variants was becoming more difficult for WHO to assess because countries were dialing back on their surveillance.

As a result, global vaccination rates have hit their lowest point since 2008 — and getting back on track could be difficult. Kate O’Brien, head of the immunization programme at the World Health Organization, said that tens of millions of lives are at stake. It’s crucial to rebuild trust in order to push back against the spread of preventable diseases.

“The projections vary a little, but generally, most people feel somewhere in the middle of November that they’ll wind up being a substantial proportion and have bumped BA.5 off as the dominant variant,” Fauci told CNN.

The variants are descended from the same viruses, which is the result of genetic drift. So they share many parts of their genomes with that virus.

Fauci said it would completely escape the protection that you would get from vaccine if people just got the shot.

New bivalent COVID booster shots are more effective at reducing risk of hospitalization than boosters of the original vaccines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in two new studies Friday.

Only about 14% of eligible Americans have gotten an updated Covid-19 booster, and 1 in 5 people in the US remain completely unvaccinated, according to the CDC.

What can we do about the Influenza, RSV, and Influenza epidemics? Mark Zeller, medical professionals, and public health

“It’s probably going to be significantly bigger than the BA.5 wave, at least that’s what I expect,” said Mark Zeller, a project scientist who monitors variants at the Scripps Research Institute. But Zeller says he doesn’t expect this winter’s surge to reach heights of January’s Omicron wave.

The genetic changes these variants share appear to help them escape the immunity created by vaccines and past infections – a recipe for reinfections and breakthrough infections, particularly for people who haven’t had an updated booster.

The US Food and Drug Administration has revoked the authorization of some antibody therapies over the last two years because of Omicron’s differences.

“So even if we got money today, it would take us many months to bring a monoclonal into the marketplace, and we don’t have the money today anyway,” Jha told CNN.

In public health, “we need to start looking outside the box to find out what messaging needs to change so that we can think out of the box and make people motivated to look for the flu vaccine again. It’s too much of a vaccine of convenience right now.

He expects the Biden administration to seek more funding from Congress for the promotion of new therapies, and that current realities require that the government continue to provide incentives.

Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, we are more at risk of being exposed to these viruses. There is a surge in the Northern Hemisphere, and what will the new normal be?

But that double threat didn’t materialize. People have let their guard down due to the mild Flu seasons of the past two years.

The population is more naive than we’d expect in most years. Normally, children get infected by their second birthday. Now, “you’re going to end up having kids that are three, four years of age right now who have never seen RSV”.

Researchers in France came up with the term immunity debt in August of 2021. On Twitter, the term has taken on a life of its own. Some people have taken it to mean that a lack of exposure to pathogens such as RSV and influenza has irrevocably damaged the immune system, an idea that Matthew Miller, an immunologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, calls “nonsense”.

There is also a lot that researchers still don’t understand about seasonal viruses. The main cause of colds, rhinoviruses, seem to have little impact on COVID-19 restrictions because of reasons that aren’t completely understood. Miller thinks that might have to do with their susceptibility to cold. They’re less prone to desiccation and can persist for longer in the environment.

One of the questions is how these viruses compete. Infection with one virus can raise a strong innate immune response that might prevent infection with another virus. Hensley says that last year’s first wave of flu was gone soon after the surge started. It might be possible that Omicron infection provided some protection against flu. Maybe people were persuaded to keep their distance by the Omicron surge.

What do we expect to see in the next winter? The long-term future of vaccination against severe disease and the number of deaths from Covid-19

The peaks and valleys may look a lot like those that took place before the swine flu struck. She isn’t placing any bets. But she says: “I do expect that this winter is probably going to be the last unusual winter.”

Meanwhile, there is some uncertainty around the longevity of this protection against severe disease. The protection against severe disease waned more quickly for the vaccine CoronaVac than for the Pfizer vaccine, according to a study in Brazil. But that study didn’t separate the data by age, and other studies have shown that protection, across the board, declines more quickly for older people. The Global Times reported earlier this month that the Chinese health officials recommend older adults and people with weak immune systems be given a fourth shot or second booster.

One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. The fact that around 300 Americans are dying from Covid-19 every day at a rough rate of about 100,000 per year, makes it the country’s third leading cause of death, doesn’t compel us to understand who is dying or why. This pattern is also a familiar one, where we don’t track the up and downs of cancer or heart disease.

Vaccination for COVID-19: An Empirical Study of the Cases of Long Covid, Omicron, Rubella, and Diphtheria

Salmon estimates that one-third and one-quarter of all US parents had serious concerns about the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccinations, which were required by the school for many children. The fence-sitters, the people who could be pushed over the edge, that worry me. This issue has become more salient in the context of COVID-19. For example, several reports have described cases of inflammation of the heart tissue — a condition called myocarditis — among adolescent boys receiving multiple shots of the mRNA vaccines3.

Routine paediatric vaccinations took a serious hit throughout the first year of the pandemic. Mosser and his colleagues combed through data from sources such as the WHO, and estimated that in 2020, COVID-19 led to 8 million to 9 million missed doses of routine childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles, rubella and diphtheria1. Some parts of Africa and Asia saw by far the sharpest drop in rates, but high-income countries in other regions also experienced dips at the start of the pandemic.

To determine exactly how much the shots have helped, researchers from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health created a computer model of disease transmission that incorporated demographic information, people’s risk factors, the dynamics of infection and general information about vaccination.

The savings may be higher if you factor in the cases of long Covid, according to one of the study authors.

“Given the emergency of highly transmissible variants and immune-evading variants like Omicron, it is a remarkable success and an extraordinary achievement,” said Galvani, founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis.

“Don’t wait. If you wait, you put yourself at risk,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Friday at an AARP event. The fall and winter months are starting to get cold. We’re all going to congregate with our families and friends for the holidays. If you are up to date, great. If you are not, get vaccinated now.”

What have we learned from the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic? How we need to take seriously the lessons we have learned from our mistakes?

The CDC recommends masking for anyone who’s on public transportation. It also suggests wearing one in other public settings in communities where there is a high level of transmission. People who are high risk of severe illness should be wearing masks.

There are things that could have been avoided. There are no effective vaccines or treatments against Sudan ebolaviruses. If the world had learnt its lesson from previous Ebola outbreaks and COVID-19, vaccines could have been ready for clinical testing at the outbreak’s start. The fact that they aren’t is a global failure.

As I reflect on the last three years of the pandemic, it wasn’t the failure of science or technology that stumped us. On the contrary, scientific breakthroughs meant we had two lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines at our disposal roughly a year after the novel coronavirus first emerged. What hurt us most was our failure of imagination.

There was a resurgence in vaccine development because of COVID-19. New vaccines are in the pipeline for many diseases. We have an opportunity to capitalize on the latest methods and a sense of urgency. We can’t continue closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. If we keep relying on a market-based model that churns out millions of doses only after an epidemic is under way, then we have already failed.

But these barriers are not immutable. It is possible if we insist that it happen when we have learned something during Covid-19. Indeed, personal experiences with Covid-19 increased Americans’ commitment to changing structural barriers to equitable care – such as the ICATT and test-to-treat programs.

The lead should be taken by rich countries. They should ensure that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), based in Oslo, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), based in New York City, are fully funded to do this work because they will involve close collaboration with government research agencies.

Vaccination Updates in the 21st Century: What Happens When People Get a Covid-19 Booster And Them?

Self-reports to the CDC’s V-safe monitoring system show that fewer than 1 in 10 people who got a Covid-19 booster between September 2021 and May 2022 got a flu shot at the same time.

Trying to persuade people to do something new can add to the hesitancy that’s already become so pervasive and make them less likely to come in at all. Instead, people seem to be much more likely to accept the offer of a flu vaccine at an appointment they scheduled to get a Covid-19 vaccine booster, or vice versa.

There is an old saying that says familiarity breeds contempt. Well, perhaps that’s a bit strong, but familiarity does seem to breed a certain nonchalance,” he said.

People can choose if they get the flu vaccine or not, but recently they have to make decisions about Covid-19 vaccine updates. Each new decision gives the chance for misinformation to take over the process.

If it were a vaccine like measles where it was really effective and not repeated it might be different, Hackell said. It is compared to Covid and flu vaccine when there is a lot of controversy, and it has less efficacy than that.

I think providers experience burnout as well, which is a moral injury. Hackell told me that the American Academy of Pediatrics is not pushing it as hard as it should be. “It gets very difficult to keep having these unproductive conversations over and over again. I don’t know whether it’s appropriate to have these long talks when your office is packed with sick kids.

Vaccine Safety Issues in the United States and Other Countries: An Overview of Chinese Social Media Controversy and the Co-administration of Flu and Covid-19

But despite the convenience of getting both shots at once, there’s evidence that linking the two isn’t the best way to boost coverage rates for either.

“We give multiple vaccines to our kids at the same time, but we haven’t typically done that for adults,” said Tan, former liaison to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee for the American Medical Association.

The initial concerns about the safety, especially for elders, have continued. “Physicians in China aren’t sure if the vaccines are safe for the elders,” Bouey says. “So there’s altogether some distrust and confusion about these vaccines – which the government has pushed so heavily. There is a lot of misinformation about the vaccine on Chinese social media.

The message might be sticking after all. According to data shared with CNN, Walgreens locations have co-administration of the flu and Covid-19 vaccine more than last year.

“At least we’ve got the uptick now, as opposed to this continuous decline that we were seeing four weeks ago,” he said. “But while I’m sounding positive, I want to remind us all that we need to be better than we currently are.”

White House Emergency Response During the Covid-19 Season: Report on Auntie Mary, RSV, and the flu, and how the White House could help

Just when you thought it was safe for a holiday visit with your Auntie Mary and her fragile health, RSV and the flu reared their heads – and now Covid-19 numbers are creeping up again.

Older people are the most affected by Covid-19 hospitalizations since early November. Hospitalization rates are four times higher for seniors than for any other age group.

In the first week of December, the US had the most Covid-19-related deaths in months. Even with vaccines and treatments widely available, the CDC reported nearly 3,000 deaths for that week.

The White House has the tools, infrastructure, and know- how to manage a disaster, according to the White House’s response co-ordinator.

The Biden administration was in constant contact with public health leaders and monitored hospital levels. If a state or community need medical personnel, supplies or other resources, the federal government is ready to help.

But thanks to the flexibility that a public health emergency declaration provided to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in early 2020, along with the federal government’s connections and buying power, hundreds of at-home Covid-19 tests have now received emergency use authorization, and there is ample availability.

People with chronic conditions and people who test positive for Covid-19 should be evaluated for treatment, which was stated by Jha on CNN.

“We want to encourage people to use those tools, and given how widespread and how available those tools are, I think if people did that, we could get through” the Covid-19 season, Jha said.

Detecting and Using Covid-19 in the Community: The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ICATT, and Brown University Perspective (with an opinion on CNN)

In Philadelphia, when schoolchildren come back from the winter break, they will be required to wear masks for 10 days as a “proactive measure” to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses, a district spokesperson said.

At Brown University, Dr. Ranney is the deputy dean at the School of Public Health and an emergency medicine professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School. This commentary is her own, she has her own views on it. Read more opinion on CNN.

At a time when New York City was in the throes of a Pandemic, my family was first diagnosed with Covid-19 in April 2020, an extremely frightening experience at a time when there was no vaccine or effective treatment available.

It is not often that we are aware that rapid at- home testing for Covid-19 is now available to almost all of us. When you feel unwell and exposed to a Viruses, you should have an at home test done before you go to a holiday party.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that at- home testing became available to the public. Then, they were expensive and difficult to find. Huge differences in use were observed in the early months. Minorities, old people and low income people were less likely to use them.

Insurers, including Medicare, reimburse consumers for up to eight tests per month per person. The ICATT provides free community testing at more than 15,000 sites in the United States. According to one government official, more than 50% of tests performed through this program are for uninsured individuals. Similar programs have been put in place with food banks, schools, federally qualified health centers and low-income senior housing.

Delivery of Paxlovid to Those Without Access to the Pharmacy, and Implications for Vaccine-Preventable Infectious Diseases

Better yet, just last week, a new partnership was announced between Walgreens, Uber Health and DoorDash to facilitate the timely delivery of Paxlovid to those who cannot get to the pharmacy. This program can reach more than 85% of Americans, according to Walgreens. In combination with existing prescription delivery services from CVS and RiteAid, this newest partnership may reduce the chance that someone sick has to go out and expose others in order to get their Paxlovid prescription. It also provides immense benefit to those who can’t get transportation or child care or are disabled.

There isn’t an FDA-approved home test for swine flu because of bureaucracy. oseltamivir isn’t as effective as Paxlovid, and there aren’t any effective treatments forRSV. It is important that any wider scale test-to-treat program does not cause more overburdening of antivirals and antibiotics. If one is unable to pay for Covid-19 test and treatment, access to other types of telehealth and medications are dependent on one’s insurance.

At the same time, we also have developments to celebrate this holiday season. There are amazing tools that can help you with disease and illness, and they are available to everyone.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released two studies about the effectiveness of the vaccine for COVID-related emergency department Visits and hospitalizations among older people.

In September, the senior vice president of global health and HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation said it would be an uphill battle. It’s a tough sell because we are at the beginning of the Pandemic.

The risks of allowing these infections to flourish are clear. Zimbabwe is currently working to contain a huge measles outbreak that claimed the lives of more than 750 children between April and October. The state of emergency in New York was created because of the re-emergence of the vaccine-preventable disease, after nearly four decades of successful elimination.

Administering vaccine is a continuous process, not a one-time triumph, and further progress proved a challenge. In the years leading up to the H1N1 outbreak, Jonathan Mosser stated that there was a stagnant of coverage of the long-established vaccines. Furthermore, regional- or national-level statistics can mask considerable inequality at the local level. There were large discrepancies in the coverage of routine childhood vaccines in South Africa, which is why they say that it is not possible to know the full extent of the problem. “The poorest provinces like Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga were not doing that well,” Ndwandwe says. “They would be bordering on 60–70%.” This is below the minimum needed for robust control of vaccine-preventable diseases.

Many of the areas impacted were due to the strong measures taken to control the spread of the disease, which included closing schools and limiting access to non-urgent medical care. But health-care providers were also struggling with limited capacity. Resources were diverted from immunization systems to respond to the COVID response. Even when there were no formal impediments to scheduling a visit to a health-care provider, social and psychological factors came into play that further undermined timely vaccination. “COVID kind of created the fear of even being in contact with the health-care services,” says Ndwandwe.

The vaccine campaign for children in limited settings was halted by the Pandemic. An analysis by the WHO found that by May 2020, nearly 60% of the 183 vaccination campaigns scheduled were either cancelled or delayed2.

There is no clear depiction of how much hesitancy surrounds other vaccines is due to concerns about COVID-19 shots. Some who study vaccine use are concerned. Salmon says that he is not surprised if we seedrops in routine vaccines in people that have been rejecting them. Omer’s research is already picking up some early indications of reduced uptake for the tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis vaccine among people in the United States who are pregnant. And even though these are still preliminary findings, he says “my concern is that this is sort of an iceberg where we’re just beginning to see the tip”.

And the possibility remains that this mistrust will spread globally. Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says “there is clearly a globally coordinated, very deep, negative network out there” exploiting pandemic-era mistrust to propagate and promote a broader anti-vaccine agenda through social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. In South Africa, Ndwandwe sees such vaccine hesitancy propagating mainly in more affluent communities that have the time and resources to find information — and misinformation — on the Internet. She says thatikTok is one of the most dangerous platforms she has seen. “That’s where a lot of these things are happening.” In poorer communities without internet access, the conversation is driven just as easily by radio broadcasts, religious leaders or poster campaigns.

There were optimistic proclamations, too. The Prime Minister of the Danes, Mette Frederiksen, declared that the disease no longer poses a threat to society. In the fall, US President Joe Biden commented that the swine flu was over. Even Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), has expressed hope that COVID-19’s designation as a global emergency will end in 2023.

The country could be facing up to 10 million new cases each day now that COV restrictions have been rolled back. Over the next several months, several hundred thousand people could die, perhaps more, several teams predict.

There is a path to renewing vaccination efforts that can be found with technology. There are vaccines under development. These are designed to be delivered through the nose or mouth and it’s hoped they can trigger sterilizing immunity that blocks transmission — not just severe illness. China and India have both approved inhalable booster vaccine and a two-dose vaccine. Iran and Russia have also each approved a mucosal vaccine. But researchers are awaiting data to check whether any of these deliver on their promise of stopping SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s just really critical that [people] — especially those at high risk — understand the value of getting vaccinated and making sure they stay up to date on their boosters,” Hannan says.

Now, the public health approach is changing. “The CDC is doing an initiative to put a few single-dose vials in long-term care facilities that have the right storage equipment.” That way, even if one resident of the facility is ready for a booster, staff at the nursing home could get a single dose out of the pharmacy-grade fridge and vaccinate that person on the spot.

With winter holidays upon us and people gathering with loved ones, Sandy Lindsay says to think about grandma. Lindsay was the first person in the US to receive a vaccine when she was a critical care nurse and now she’s the VP of public health advocacy at Northwell Health. She says “We all have a responsibility to our loved ones.” “If you are sick, stay home. Grandma — take her to get vaccinated as a Christmas gift.”

Baur has worked with health workers in Maryland who are out talking to the public about vaccinations. Baur doesn’t think anything we or anyone else did has found a particular message or fact that is changing hearts and minds.

The mass vaccination system that popped up during the pandemic isn’t how most adults get vaccinated, she points out. So as those systems close down, it may be time to put the focus back on health care providers, like doctors, who can have a relationship with patients and really hear their concerns and answer their questions.

There are a lot of ways to combat vaccine hesitancy, including focusing on misinformation or politicization or trust in public health. “I decided to take an angle that’s a little bit different, which is to look at how to improve the vaccination experience,” says Moore of Immunize.org.

She says that theAutism society for America has pioneered strategies to help families and their children get vaccinations, since it can cause stress and distress for people with autism. They have low cost options like putting on headphones, listening to your favorite music, or using plastic “shot blocker” that can make the shot hurt less.

I recently tried a variation of this when I took my 7-year-old daughter, Noa, to get her bivalent booster. (Fear of needles among kids is even higher than among adults — more like 2 in 3.) I bought an over-the-counter lidocaine patch (marketed for back pain) at the drugstore and cut it to fit her bicep. I stuck it onto her arm for about 30 minutes before we left. Then I drew an outline on her skin around the patch, so the immunizer could give her the shot in that area. Noa said she was happy that the shot didn’t hurt and that she hadn’t cried. And she asked if we could use it for every shot from now on.

Msids on made-in-China COVID vaccines: Vaccines’ effectiveness among the elders in China and the implications of early data

There’s also concern that widespread COVID in China could lead to new variants, but variants can emerge anywhere in the world right now as COVID continues to circulate.

There is a lot of rumors and misinformation about COVID vaccines. But, as NPR has reported, such myths and misconceptions are especially problematic for vaccines made in China. Issues with past vaccines have made segments of the population leery about the made-in-China COVID vaccines. But the misinformation about these vaccines doesn’t arise only from inside China or on social media, says global health researcher Xi Chen at Yale University.

Initial data found the Chinese vaccines have a lower level of protection against infection than the mRNA vaccines. “About 50% or more effective,” says Cowling. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed high levels of protection against the original strains of the virus.

Scientists tested the vaccines only on adults under age 60, according to an epidemiologist at Georgetown University. The first two vaccine campaigns in China didn’t pay much attention to elders.

After only two doses, Pfizer’s vaccine was more effective for older adults. Specifically, the Pfizer vaccine offered about 87-to-92% protection for this group while CoronaVac offered only 64-to-75% protection. But, Cowling points out, an extra booster – or third dose – of CoronaVac lifts the protection to about 98%, the same protection observed with three doses of Pfizer.

Cowling thinks the misinformation may be related to early data on the vaccine’s effectiveness against infections.

The emergence of the immune-evading variants, such as omicron and Delta, resulted in all vaccines being almost useless after three to four months after the inoculation.

That exclusion from both the trials and vaccination campaigns has led to the relatively low vaccination rate among elders in China. It has raised concerns about whether the vaccines were effective among the elders.

Some billion people have been treated with Sinopharm and CoronaVac in over 100 countries. Half of all shots were made up of them. There have never been reports of serious side effects with these vaccines.

US regulators loosened restrictions on who could prescribe Paxlovid in December after they first authorized it in December 2021, an effort to make it more widely available. But health officials lament that the drug has not been deployed to the extent they had expected: about 10 million Paxlovid courses have been delivered to the United States, but only about 6.7 million have been used.

This underuse stems in part from misinformation and misconceptions about the drug, says Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease physician at Columbia University in New York City.

Researchers found that rebound happened in people who didn’t take Paxlovid3. Precise estimates for rebound incidence vary, depending on the population studied and the definition of ‘rebound’. It is common for people to experience a symptom rebound and a viral rebound at the same time, even though they are not taking Paxlovid. Smith says that the symptom rebound tends to be mild, and is far preferable to hospitalization or death.

Smith says that Paxlovid makes some food taste bitter and metallic, both of which reinforce the idea that it is toxic. Smith says it’s not easy to adhere to the treatment regimen of taking several pills twice a day for five days.

Improving COVID-19 Immunization by Adding New Anti-Emetics to the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, Nashville, Tennessee

Such concerns have led health officials to point to hesitancy to explain why use of the drug has fallen short. But there are also systemic reasons, says Anne Sosin, a public-health-policy specialist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The FDA wants to update COVID-19 vaccines once a year, which is similar to the approach the agency takes with influenza vaccines. At a meeting of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel on 26 January, some researchers argued that the plan would help to simplify the country’s complex COVID-19 immunization schedule and might boost uptake as a result.

Peter Marks is the Head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. Hospitals in the US ran out of space this season due to a surge in infections with the respiratory syncytial virus, orRSV.

Standardizing vaccine composition for the primary and booster series would probably mean that the bivalent vaccine would become the main formulation for people who haven’t yet had a primary series.

In March 2020, when Covid-19 was found in North America, researchers from the University of Tennessee tracked down some of the first known Covid-19 patients and asked them for blood samples.

Doctors shipped vials of the blood to Nashville, where the Vanderbilt team got to work analyzing it for proteins called antibodies, which the immune system generates when it’s exposed to a virus or other foreign substance. In particular, the Vanderbilt team was looking for neutralizing antibodies—those capable of binding to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and preventing it from entering cells and causing infection.

“We had been seeing the data,” says Robert Carnahan, associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center. “We had already mourned the loss of Evusheld and knew it was just a matter of time.” It was the last remaining antibody drug designed to fight Covid-19.

These existing antibodies binding to a small piece of the virus known as the Receptor binding domain is a problem. The part has constantly changed and can’t be identified by the current version of the anti-emetics.

The FDA withdrew the emergency use authorization for bebtelovimab in November because of the new sublineage of Omicron.

Paxlovid is still effective against XBB. 1.5 because it uses a different method to target the virus. The purpose of the antivirals is to stop the viruses from replicating in the body.

“Over the course of five years,” Dr. Corbett said, “we had already determined which parts of the virus would excite the body’s immune system in a way that would cause protective immunity.”

Understanding that spike proteins were at the heart of an adequate defense against infection, Dr. Corbett and other scientists had created experimental vaccines against SARS and MERS. They had a prototype they could already use, since they had swapped the genetic code for the virus that created Covid-19. This ability to apply a template is referred to as the plug and play approach by Dr. Corbett.

Dr. Graham credits her with playing a formative role in the vaccine’s development. The coronaviruses and Kizzmekia’s work led to what we knew about the coronaviruses, and made us start making the vaccine as quickly as possible.

By March 2020, Moderna was running the first human trials of its vaccine, and by December 2020 — less than a year after the first deaths in Wuhan were reported — it was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use.

Shionogi says the data show the potential of ensitrel vaccine to prevent chronic bronchitis. But scientists are sceptical about that claim and critical of the design of the clinical trial. The research was presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Seattle, Washington, on 21 February, and has not yet been peer reviewed.

The main goal of the ensitrelvir trial was to determine if the drug could accelerate recovery. The results showed that participants who took 125-milligram ensitrelvir pills recovered from five specific symptoms — stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish and low energy or tiredness — about 24 hours earlier than did those in the control group.

Participants who took the 125-milligram dose also tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 about 29 hours earlier than did those who took a placebo. The study was the first to show a reduction in time to a negative test result.

Simon Portsmouth, head of clinical development at Shionogi in Florham Park, New Jersey, says that the company could not specify the plan for analysing long COVID data ahead of time because long COVID was less clearly defined in the past than now. The results of the trial evaluating the effect on COVID-19 symptoms will be shaped by these results.

Topol agrees that the data that Shionogi have made public support the idea that antivirals protect against long COVID, at least when residual virus is involved in causing prolonged symptoms.

There is no consensus on the causes of long COVID. “It’s entirely possible that the virus has nothing to do with long COVID,” says Edward Mills, a health researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He points out that long COVID may be caused by the immune response to the virus.

Why Should We Give Up on Covid-19? The Case for Prevention, Screening, Treatment, and Operation Warp Speed 2.0 (Review)

Editor’s Note: Syra Madad, an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator, is the senior director of the systemwide special pathogens program at NYC Health + Hospitals, and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She tweets @syramadad. She has her own views in this commentary. CNN has more opinions on it.

But the virus that causes Covid-19 has not disappeared. Covid-19 still kills an average of 327 Americans every day according to the CDC. For comparison, lung cancer causes more than 350 deaths each day in this country — the highest number of deaths for all types of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. There are still massive efforts made to educate the public on lung cancer prevention, screening and treatment. There has still been research and the search for better treatment. So why should we accept anything less for Covid-19?

Long Covid is a term for many new, returning, or ongoing health problems that people experience after they have been exposed to disease. According to the US Census Bureau, around 16 million working age Americans have long Covid, and up to four million of them are out of work.

The last Congress did not fund next-generation Covid-19 vaccines or treatment and it seems unlikely that our current Congress will do so either. But we are in desperate need of an Operation Warp Speed 2.0 as we continue to experience the evolution of this virus, which has been chipping away at the protective wall of immunity we’ve built over the last few years. To stop funding now would be foolish.