Tag Archives: Vaccinations

Health

Should you get your Covid booster and flu shot at the same time?

Leave a comment

With flu season approaching, plus the possibility of another surge of Covid cases this fall, many Americans are wondering two things: When is the best time to get the flu vaccine – if there is one – and is it okay to double up and receive both the seasonal flu vaccine and new omicron-specific Covid-19 booster at the same time?

Though the CDC says it’s completely fine to get a flu vaccine and Covid-19 shot simultaneously, there hasn’t been specific guidance pertaining to the newly formulated booster.

Yet, pharmacies like Walgreens and CVS are offering the vaccines as a packaged deal, and people have already begun getting immunized with both shots at the same time.

But not all public health experts believe this is the best approach, especially given the average flu shot timeline that the U.S. has followed since before the pandemic, says Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist and associate professor at Rockefeller University.

“For the average person, probably having it a little bit later would be better,” Hatziioannou says, “I’m certainly waiting.”

‘When should I get my flu vaccine?’

The timing of when you get your flu shot should be aligned with the time frame that would allow you to have the best antibody response during the beginning of flu season, Hatziioannou tells CNBC Make It. 

It’s important to look at data from recent years, prior to the pandemic, in your local area to determine when cases historically start to increase in your community, Hatziioannou says.

The standard rule of thumb is get your vaccination four weeks before the beginning of flu season in order to have the most protection because that’s when you’ll have the best antibody response, she notes.

“In New York and several other areas with the same geographical latitude, flu season usually starts in December and lasts until March,” she says, “So, if you have it [the flu shot] now, at the end of September or [early] October, your peak antibody responses will be in November. It’s a little bit too early.”

At this time, Hatziioannou recommends getting your flu shot at the end of October or early November to have the highest protection throughout December.

And the protection provided by the vaccine generally wanes over time, so if you get the vaccine too early, you could have less antibodies at the tail end of flu season, she says.

“The one thing I would say is this year I would definitely get both shots because the combination could be quite nasty,” Hatziioannou says.

“You don’t want to get the flu while Covid’s going around, and you don’t want to get SARS-CoV-2 while the flu is going around. I can envision that a double whammy would be really terrible.”

‘Should I get my omicron booster and flu shot at the same time?’

There aren’t any specific reasons why you can’t get your omicron booster at the same time as your flu vaccine, says Mark Conroy, emergency medicine physician at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. 

“In terms of side effects from the omicron-specific vaccine and the flu shot, there haven’t been any studies specifically looking at those two together,” Conroy says, “But there have been some studies looking at the prior booster with the flu shot, and there really wasn’t a negative effect related to having both shots at the same time.”

And if you’re worried about not being able to find availability later in the year to get your flu shot, then Conroy encourages you to get a dual-appointment. 

“If you don’t get them at the same time, what’s the biggest risk? And the risk is just forgetting to get the flu shot later,” he says, “If you have the chance, obviously get vaccinated over not getting vaccinated.”

But, if you can wait for your flu shot, he does recommend doing so until mid- to late-October or the beginning of November as Hatziioannou suggested.

“From the standpoint of the omicron booster, my recommendation is people should just get it as soon as they’re able. Covid is around enough and making people sick,” he says, “September is a little bit early for the flu shot. I generally recommend getting it a little bit later in the fall.”

Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter

Don’t miss:

Read original article here

Health

Get omicron-specific Covid booster shot by Halloween

Leave a comment

Dr. Ashish Jha has an easy-to-remember deadline for when you should get the new omicron-specific booster shot: Halloween.

“Why Halloween? Because three weeks after Halloween is Thanksgiving, and there’s a lot of travel, and you’re seeing family, and you’re seeing friends — and a few weeks later, it’s the holidays,” Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, said during an episode of the “In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt” podcast on Monday.

“We know respiratory viruses circulate at much higher levels in the fall and winter. It’s a really good time to get yourself protected,” Jha added. “And even if you yourself are on the low-risk side, you’re going to have family and friends you’re going to see. You don’t want to be the person who gives it to your grandma.”

The new shots from Pfizer and Moderna, which target both the original Covid strain and omicron’s BA.5 and BA.4 subvariants, are available to a wide swath of Americans who have received their primary vaccination series.

If you have a high risk of severe Covid, you may want to get the new shot much earlier than Halloween, Jha noted. That includes people who are elderly or immunocompromised, and those with underlying medical conditions.

Likewise, if you only recently got a Covid vaccine or recovered from a Covid infection, you might want to wait a little bit, Jha acknowledged. The CDC says you need to be at least two months out from your last dose of any Covid vaccine, and should consider waiting three months if you’ve recently had the virus.

Covid shots typically take two or three weeks post-injection to ramp up to full protection. That protection tends to last for about three or four months before beginning to wane.

Jha said it’s better to get the new shot sooner rather than later, urging people to avoid waiting until late November and December if they can. The doses will serve as an extra layer of protection that will be badly needed during the fall and winter, when immunity from previous vaccines wanes and people spend a lot more time indoors, he said.

The weather during those seasons also turns the air cold and dry, making it easier for tiny droplets of the virus to survive when people sneeze, cough or talk. New U.S. cases rose to a then-record high in December 2021, with a seven-day average of more than 265,000 per day. The country saw a similar escalating surge in cases in late 2020.

Even if you aren’t worried about getting the virus yourself, Jha said to remember that you can still spread it to high-risk loved ones during fall and winter social gatherings, from Thanksgiving through the winter holidays.

“You don’t want to be the person who gives it to your vulnerable friend who’s immunocompromised,” he said. “Lots of good reasons for people to go get it this fall.”

Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter

Don’t miss:

Read original article here

Health

New York to ramp up polio vaccinations after virus found in wastewater

Leave a comment

New York Governor Kathy Hochul speaks during a news conference regarding new gun laws in New York, U.S., August 31, 2022. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

NEW YORK, Sept 9 (Reuters) – New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a disaster emergency on Friday in a bid to accelerate efforts to vaccinate residents against polio after the virus was detected in wastewater samples taken in four counties.

Hochul’s executive order followed the discovery of the virus last month in samples from Long Island’s Nassau County, bordering the New York City borough of Queens. Earlier this year the virus was found in samples from Rockland, Orange and Sullivan counties, all north of the city.

In July, the first confirmed case of polio in the United States in nearly a decade turned up in an adult in Rockland County, according to the state health department.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

“On polio, we simply cannot roll the dice,” State Health Commissioner Mary Bassett said in a statement. “If you or your child are unvaccinated or not up to date with vaccinations, the risk of paralytic disease is real.”

Polio can cause irreversible paralysis in some cases, but it can be prevented by a vaccine first made available in 1955. While there is no known cure, three injections of the vaccine provide nearly 100% immunity.

People of all ages are under threat, though the virus primarily affects children aged three and younger.

Officials urged unvaccinated adults and minors as young as two months old to get inoculated against the virus, and advised that vaccinated people receive a lifetime booster dose.

Hochul’s declaration authorizes paramedics, midwives and pharmacists to administer polio vaccinations, among other steps, to accelerate inoculation rates. The order also directs health-care providers to update the state with data on immunizations.

The state of emergency will stay in effect until Oct. 9. Health official set a goal of getting 90% of residents vaccinated.

The state health department warned people in New York City, Rockland, Orange, Sullivan and Nassau counties are at the highest risk.

Orange County has the lowest vaccination rate of the counties of concern with less than 59% being immunized, according to the state health department.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Reporting by Tyler Clifford in New York and Rami Ayyub
Editing by Alistair Bell and David Gregorio

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Read original article here

Health

‘Silent’ spread of polio in New York drives CDC to consider additional vaccinations for some people

Leave a comment

The case was found In Rockland County, which has a stunningly low polio vaccination rate. Dr. José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, noted that the majority of people with polio don’t have symptoms and so can spread the virus without knowing it.

“There are a number of individuals in the community that have been infected with poliovirus. They are shedding the virus,” he said. “The spread is always a possibility because the spread is going to be silent.”

A team of CDC disease detectives traveled last week from agency headquarters in Atlanta to Rockland County, and they are “quite nervous” that polio “could mushroom out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis on our hands,” said a community health leader who has met with the team.

“They are — what is the opposite of cautiously optimistic?” said another community leader, an expert in vaccine education, who has also met with the CDC team in Rockland County. Both leaders requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Polio can cause incurable paralysis and death, but most people in the US are protected, thanks to vaccination. Others, however, may be vulnerable to the virus for a variety of reasons.

Unvaccinated and undervaccinated people are vulnerable, and polio vaccination rates in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County, just north of New York City, are about 60%, compared with 93% nationwide. Immune-compromised people can be vulnerable even if they are fully vaccinated.
Romero said the CDC is considering a variety of options to protect people from polio, including offering children in the area an extra shot of the vaccine, as UK health authorities are doing now in London, or recommending extra doses to certain groups of adults.

“We’re looking into all aspects of how to deal with this. At this point, we don’t have a definitive answer,” he said.

A ‘silent killer’

The Rockland County polio case is the first identified in the United States in nearly a decade.

The virus has also been detected in sewage in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County. The positive samples were genetically linked to the individual case, but no other cases in the US have been reported.
About 3 in 4 people infected with polio don’t have symptoms, but they’re still capable of spreading the virus to others, according to the CDC. Among the rest, most have symptoms such as a sore throat or headache that could easily be overlooked or confused with other illnesses. Only a relatively small number, about 1 in 200 infected people, become paralyzed. A few of those who are paralyzed die because they can’t breathe.
In the late 1940s, polio outbreaks disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. A vaccination campaign started in 1955, and cases quickly plummeted. Today, a full round of childhood polio vaccinations — four doses between 2 months old and 6 years old — is at least 99% effective, according to the CDC.
But in recent decades, some small groups have not vaccinated their children against the virus. One of them is within the ultraorthodox Jewish community in New York, including in Rockland County.

Much of the rest of the religious Jewish community in Rockland County has rallied around efforts to educate the “outliers” who refuse to vaccinate, the community health leader said.

“This is a silent killer, like carbon monoxide, and we don’t know when it will hit us,” she said.

‘A press release is not going to cut it’

The vaccine educator said the CDC team has been intent on learning the best ways to communicate with members of this community, who tend not to use the internet and instead get a lot of their information from the messaging platform WhatsApp as well as community newspapers.

This week, Rockland County and local health-care providers distributed an infographic in English and Yiddish that announced, “Polio is spreading in Rockland County.”

The vaccine educator in Rockland County said that at the meetings with the CDC team, “we spoke about the need for messaging that resonates, and a press release is not going to cut it.”

Dr. Mary Leahy, CEO of the largest health-care provider in Rockland County, Bon Secours Charity Health System, a member of WMCHealth, has attended meetings with the CDC and said that to get people who are not vaccinating their children against polio to understand the severity of the disease, “I turn to the grandparents and the great-grandparents who actually lived through the days of polio in the ’40s and ’50s.”

That makes sense to Romero.

“I grew up in Mexico. I saw this disease, the complications,” he said. “I went to school with children that had braces.”

He said many Americans don’t recognize the “devastating” effects of “lifelong paralysis” from polio.

“I think most of the American public has never seen a case of polio. People have lost that fear, if you will, of the disease.”

CNN’s Danielle Herman and John Bonifield contributed to this report.

Read original article here

Health

‘Silent’ spread of polio in New York drives CDC to consider additional vaccinations for some people

Leave a comment

The case was found In Rockland County, which has a stunningly low polio vaccination rate. Dr. José Romero, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, noted that the majority of people with polio don’t have symptoms and so can spread the virus without knowing it.

“There are a number of individuals in the community that have been infected with poliovirus. They are shedding the virus,” he said. “The spread is always a possibility because the spread is going to be silent.”

A team of CDC disease detectives traveled last week from agency headquarters in Atlanta to Rockland County, and they are “quite nervous” that polio “could mushroom out of control very quickly and we could have a crisis on our hands,” said a community health leader who has met with the team.

“They are — what is the opposite of cautiously optimistic?” said another community leader, an expert in vaccine education, who has also met with the CDC team in Rockland County. Both leaders requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Polio can cause incurable paralysis and death, but most people in the US are protected, thanks to vaccination. Others, however, may be vulnerable to the virus for a variety of reasons.

Unvaccinated and undervaccinated people are vulnerable, and polio vaccination rates in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County, just north of New York City, are about 60%, compared with 93% nationwide. Immune-compromised people can be vulnerable even if they are fully vaccinated.
Romero said the CDC is considering a variety of options to protect people from polio, including offering children in the area an extra shot of the vaccine, as UK health authorities are doing now in London, or recommending extra doses to certain groups of adults.

“We’re looking into all aspects of how to deal with this. At this point, we don’t have a definitive answer,” he said.

A ‘silent killer’

The Rockland County polio case is the first identified in the United States in nearly a decade.

The virus has also been detected in sewage in Rockland County and neighboring Orange County. The positive samples were genetically linked to the individual case, but no other cases in the US have been reported.
About 3 in 4 people infected with polio don’t have symptoms, but they’re still capable of spreading the virus to others, according to the CDC. Among the rest, most have symptoms such as a sore throat or headache that could easily be overlooked or confused with other illnesses. Only a relatively small number, about 1 in 200 infected people, become paralyzed. A few of those who are paralyzed die because they can’t breathe.
In the late 1940s, polio outbreaks disabled an average of more than 35,000 people a year in the US. A vaccination campaign started in 1955, and cases quickly plummeted. Today, a full round of childhood polio vaccinations — four doses between 2 months old and 6 years old — is at least 99% effective, according to the CDC.
But in recent decades, some small groups have not vaccinated their children against the virus. One of them is within the ultraorthodox Jewish community in New York, including in Rockland County.

Much of the rest of the religious Jewish community in Rockland County has rallied around efforts to educate the “outliers” who refuse to vaccinate, the community health leader said.

“This is a silent killer, like carbon monoxide, and we don’t know when it will hit us,” she said.

‘A press release is not going to cut it’

The vaccine educator said the CDC team has been intent on learning the best ways to communicate with members of this community, who tend not to use the internet and instead get a lot of their information from the messaging platform WhatsApp as well as community newspapers.

This week, Rockland County and local health-care providers distributed an infographic in English and Yiddish that announced, “Polio is spreading in Rockland County.”

The vaccine educator in Rockland County said that at the meetings with the CDC team, “we spoke about the need for messaging that resonates, and a press release is not going to cut it.”

Dr. Mary Leahy, CEO of the largest health-care provider in Rockland County, Bon Secours Charity Health System, a member of WMCHealth, has attended meetings with the CDC and said that to get people who are not vaccinating their children against polio to understand the severity of the disease, “I turn to the grandparents and the great-grandparents who actually lived through the days of polio in the ’40s and ’50s.”

That makes sense to Romero.

“I grew up in Mexico. I saw this disease, the complications,” he said. “I went to school with children that had braces.”

He said many Americans don’t recognize the “devastating” effects of “lifelong paralysis” from polio.

“I think most of the American public has never seen a case of polio. People have lost that fear, if you will, of the disease.”

CNN’s Danielle Herman and John Bonifield contributed to this report.

Read original article here

Health

Polio found in New York wastewater as state urges vaccinations

Leave a comment

WASHINGTON, Aug 1 (Reuters) – The polio virus was present in wastewater in a New York City suburb a month before health officials there announced a confirmed case of the disease last month, state health officials said on Monday, urging residents to be sure they have been vaccinated.

The discovery of the disease from wastewater samples collected in June means the virus was present in the community before the Rockland County adult’s diagnosis was made public July 21. read more

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an emailed statement that the presence of the virus in wastewater indicates there may be more people in the community shedding the virus in their stool.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Register

However, the CDC added there have been no new cases identified, and that it is not yet clear whether the virus is actively spreading in New York or elsewhere in the United States.

Laboratory tests also confirmed the strain in the case is genetically linked to one found in Israel, although that did not mean the patient had traveled to Israel, officials added. The CDC said genetic sequencing also tied it to samples of the highly contagious and life-threatening virus in the United Kingdom.

The patient had started exhibiting symptoms in June, when local officials asked doctors to be on the lookout for cases, according to the New York Times.

“Given how quickly polio can spread, now is the time for every adult, parent, and guardian to get themselves and their children vaccinated as soon as possible,” State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett said.

There is no cure for polio, which can cause irreversible paralysis in some cases, but it can be prevented by a vaccine made available in 1955.

New York officials have said they are opening vaccine clinics to help unvaccinated residents get their shots. Inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) is the only polio vaccine that has been given in the United States since 2000, according to the CDC. It is given by shot in the leg or arm, depending on the patient’s age.

Polio is often asymptomatic and people can transmit the virus even when they do not appear sick. But it can produce mild, flu-like symptoms that can take as long as 30 days to appear, officials said.

It can strike at any age but the majority of those affected are children aged three and younger.

Representatives for the New York health department could not be immediately reached for more details on the wastewater findings.

The polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk in the 1950s was heralded as a scientific achievement to tackle the global scourge, now largely eradicated nationwide. The United States has not seen a polio case generated in the country since 1979, although cases from a traveler and an oral vaccine were found in 1993 and 2013.

Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

Register

Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Aurora Ellis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Read original article here

World

India hits 2 billion Covid vaccinations as infections hit four-month high

Leave a comment

Prime Minister Narendra Modi extolled the vaccination milestone, celebrating the world’s largest and longest-running inoculation campaign that began last year.

“India creates history again!” Modi said in a tweet. The prime minister has faced allegations from the opposition of mishandling the pandemic that experts claim killed millions. The government rejects the claims.

Health ministry data shows the Covid death toll at 525,709, with 49 deaths recorded overnight.

New cases rose 20,528 over the past 24 hours, the highest since Feb. 20, according to data compiled by Reuters.

The country of 1.35 billion people has lifted most Covid-related restrictions, and international travel has recovered robustly.

Some 80% of the inoculations have been the AstraZeneca vaccine made domestically, called Covishield. Others include domestically developed Covaxin and Corbevax, and Russia’s Sputnik V.

The federal government has been accelerating its booster campaign to avert the spread of infections, edging higher in the eastern states of Assam, West Bengal and Karnataka in the south.

Read original article here

Business

Why new Novavax Covid vaccine won’t win over unvaccinated Americans

Leave a comment

Unvaccinated Americans will soon be able to opt for a new kind of shot to protect themselves from the ever-evolving Covid-19 virus: the Novavax vaccine.

The latecomer Covid shot has raised hopes of wider acceptance among vaccine skeptics. It uses traditional protein-based technology, unlike its mRNA counterparts. But experts say it still may not convince a large number of unwilling holdouts to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated.

“I don’t think a shot like Novavax with well-worn technology is suddenly going to convince unvaccinated people to say, ‘Now, I want to get a vaccine, now I believe a vaccine will keep me out of the hospital and ICU,'” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of an independent advisory group to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, tells CNBC Make It. 

On Wednesday, the FDA authorized the Novavax shot for adults ages 18 and up. Once approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’ll only be available as a two-dose primary series, rather than a booster — which means only unvaccinated Americans will be able to receive it.

According to CDC data from early June, roughly 27 million U.S. adults still haven’t received a single Covid shot, posing a significant obstacle for American efforts to finally force Covid into a manageable, endemic phase. The U.S. is already grappling with yet another surge in Covid cases — this time, driven by highly transmissible omicron subvariants like BA.5 — and unless the country’s vaccination rate improves, a more severe variant of concern may soon emerge.

Here’s how Novavax’s Covid vaccine could help, and why many unvaccinated people might still pass on it.

The new vaccine’s appeal to people afraid of mRNA tech

The Novavax shot is the fourth Covid shot to earn FDA clearance in the U.S. and the first to use protein technology — a decades-old method of virus-fighting used in multiple routine vaccinations, like those against hepatitis B and shingles.

It’s highly effective, according to clinical data: Two doses were 90% effective at preventing illness from Covid when tested in a study involving about 30,000 adults ages 18 and older, according to the FDA. Notably, the research was conducted from December 2020 through September 2021, a few months before the emergence of Covid’s omicron variant.

Novavax’s shot works differently than its mRNA counterparts, but achieves the same outcome: teaching your body how to fight Covid. It injects copies of the spike protein — a molecule found on the coronavirus — and an ingredient called adjuvant into your body’s cells, which induces an immune response to the virus.

“Novavax essentially uses the same approach as mRNA vaccines, but they make the protein in a factory. So they’re giving you the protein itself, rather than instructions for your cells to make a protein,” says Dr. Robert Schooley, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Diego Health.

Guy Palmer, a professor of pathology and infectious diseases at Washington State University, says the Novavax vaccine could potentially appeal to Americans who falsely believe that mRNA vaccines are unsafe, due to the technology’s perceived newness and a misconception that they could alter human DNA.

“There’s a slight open door there for a non-mRNA vaccine like Novavax,” Palmer says.

Vaccine denialism is a cultural issue 

Unvaccinated Americans may perceive protein-based shots as safer than mRNA ones: In a Morning Consult poll last week, about 28% of unvaccinated people surveyed said they viewed protein-based shots as safe, while only 17% said the same about mRNA vaccines.

But 77% still said they wouldn’t get a protein-based Covid shot if it were authorized in the U.S.

Offit points to a larger problem at hand: Vaccine denialism has become a cultural issue, no matter the technology behind the shots. He says many unvaccinated Americans, especially those who are politically right-leaning, are now fueled by hardwired ideas like government distrust.

In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released in May, only 14% of Republicans surveyed said they had a “great deal or fair amount of trust” in President Joe Biden to provide reliable information about Covid vaccines. The poll also notes that Republicans are among those with the lowest vaccination rates, at just 55%.

Even today’s most common anti-vaccination argument — that the vaccines are pointless, because they can’t always prevent breakthrough infections — may be a cover for those types of hardwired ideas. (No vaccine is ever 100% effective, and staying up-to-date on your Covid vaccines can significantly lower your chances of severe illness, hospitalization or death.)

“Some say they don’t want an mRNA vaccine, so this protein vaccine can be an alternative. But other people might say I just don’t like vaccines, period. Or I don’t trust the FDA or the government,” Schooley says. “Providing rational explanations and alternatives like Novavax that address some concerns doesn’t necessarily get you past the fact that there’s just an aversion to being vaccinated.”

The Novavax vaccine is still good news

The shot’s entrance into the U.S. market could still be good news, says Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Health.

Another source of vaccine supply is “always good to have” in case other companies have manufacturing difficulties, Blumberg says. It can ensure that an event similar to the recent baby formula shortage won’t happen with Covid vaccines, he adds. 

Blumberg also emphasizes that any progress in getting holdouts vaccinated should be celebrated. 

“I’m not sure how many of the remaining unvaccinated people in the U.S. are going to be interested in getting this Novavax vaccine — but it’s one more tool in the toolbox,” he says. “Even if just a few people take advantage of getting vaccinated with it, that’s great.”

Offit says Novavax may have a larger impact down the road: Its omicron-specific booster shots may be ready for federal approval this fall or winter, and pre-clinical data shows they could potentially provide enhanced immunity against omicron and its subvariants.

“You have a certain part of the population that is clearly interested in getting as many doses as possible,” Offit says, adding that people could view a Novavax booster as “an advantage” over a shot that’s the same as their previous doses.

Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter

Don’t miss:

Omicron-specific Covid vaccines could finally be here this fall—here’s what you need to know

Timing, side effects, vaccine selection: Everything you need to know about Covid vaccinations for kids under 5

Read original article here

Health

Why we’re still in a pandemic

Leave a comment

Dr. Ashish Jha has a theory about why, after two years and counting, the Covid-19 pandemic still isn’t over.

According to Jha, the White House’s Covid response coordinator, scientists and public health officials have mostly nailed the medical response to the pandemic: As experts have learned more about the coronavirus, the U.S. has continually adapted its safety guidelines and treatment plans accordingly.

The problem, Jha said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado, last week, is that those experts often fail to communicate effectively about those shifts — leading many Americans to mistrust the science and turn to social media for health information over publicly appointed doctors and scientists.

“We got the biological science right, but we didn’t get the social science right,” Jha said.

The medical response to Covid has indeed been impressive: In record time, scientists created multiple highly safe Covid vaccines that are especially effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalization and death. New booster shots targeting specific Covid strains — for even stronger protection — are on the path toward federal approval, too.

For those who fall particularly ill from a Covid infection, multiple therapeutic drugs are currently on the market, with more in the development pipeline. Jha directly attributed these advancements to stellar communication within the scientific community.

“The sheer amount of collaboration that happened in the scientific community was unprecedented,” Jha said, adding: “That was a major reason we got vaccines and treatments, and all of that was scientists trusting each other to use [each other’s] information wisely.”

But frequent changes to the nation’s safety guidelines, particularly early in the pandemic, torpedoed many people’s faith in official messaging around Covid — causing them to interpret a large swath of information from public health experts as inaccurate. That mistrust may be keeping some people from getting vaccinated even today, and the country’s lagging vaccination rate is a significant reason the virus is still circulating.

Jha highlighted one particularly frustrating fact: The country’s initial Covid guidelines weren’t even based on the coronavirus itself. The virus was too new for scientists to know much about it yet, so public health agencies crafted their recommendations from their knowledge of a seemingly comparable virus: the flu.

The inability — or unwillingness — to communicate that fact in those early pandemic days could have far-reaching consequences, Jha said: “I think what we should’ve done is say, ‘We don’t know how this virus spreads. Our mental model is influenza. Here’s how influenza spreads and this is why right now we say this.”

Such an approach could have left more room for experts to change guidelines while maintaining the public’s trust, Jha said.

“You’re not going to get it right on the first draft,” he explained. “I think that’s OK. But you need to explain to people why you changed your mind and why you were so sure initially … Explaining your level of confidence and then explaining how you’re going to go verify are important parts of the message.”

A similar pattern played out when Covid vaccines became available to the general public in early 2021, Jha said: Because public health experts assumed that most Americans would want to get vaccinated immediately, they focused their messaging on what they didn’t yet know about the vaccines, rather than what they did know.

“Most scientists went out there and said, ‘We have no idea whether these vaccines reduce transmission or not.’ And most Americans heard, ‘These vaccines don’t reduce transmission,'” said Jha. “Because we weren’t sure, we led with, ‘We don’t know,’ which was assumed to mean ‘no.'”

Going forward, Jha said, public health officials — including himself — should make concerted efforts to lay everything out on the table. Often, he said, people don’t necessarily need certainty. They need a judgment call from a trusted source.

“Science is a journey. Science is a process,” said Jha. “And that I think has not been clearly communicated to people.”

Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter

Don’t miss:

Read original article here

Health

How Covid vaccines for kids under 5 can help end the pandemic: experts

Leave a comment

For months, the country has been waiting on a pandemic turning point — and it might be here, in the form of kids under age 5 becoming eligible for Covid vaccines.

Just don’t expect it to make Covid disappear overnight, experts say.

Covid vaccines for small children are “absolutely a game changer for some families,” Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, tells CNBC Make It. “[But] this isn’t the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, unfortunately.”

The good news is very good: A new 18 million people are now eligible to get vaccinated in the coming months, and even a fraction of them would significantly up the country’s overall protection against the virus.

But low vaccination rates among the rest of the U.S. population — coupled with the emergence of new variants and constant regional Covid surges — make it difficult to determine when exactly the pandemic will fade into endemic status.

Here’s why, and what experts say you can do to help the Covid pandemic finally end:

Low vaccination rates are still a big problem

About two-thirds of people in the U.S. have now received a primary Covid vaccine series, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number sinks dramatically among young age groups: As of last week, less than 30% of eligible 5- to 11-year-olds were fully vaccinated against Covid-19 in the U.S.

Many parents may be understandably nervous about their child receiving a new vaccine. But opting out does those children more harm than good, says Dr. Jesica Herrick, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine: Just under 90% of kids ages 5 to 11 who were hospitalized for Covid during the December omicron surge were unvaccinated, according to the CDC.

As soon as Herrick received access to the vaccine, her 7-month-old son got his vaccination last week. “People aren’t as close to the data and numbers as we are,” she says, “I got my child vaccinated the first appointment I could get, and I think that’s true of most physicians.”

Part of the problem, Herrick says, is that Covid fatigue is in full swing amid much of the U.S. population. For many people, omicron and its subvariants don’t cause particularly severe illness, especially among the fully vaccinated — giving people less reason to be stringently cautious about virus prevention.

But there’s no guarantee Covid’s mutations end with omicron, says Ali Mokdad, chief strategy officer of population health at the University of Washington in Seattle. As long as the virus keeps circulating in some fashion, it can mutate again — and it’s impossible to predict the severity of future variants.

“We can’t just will away the pandemic. You can’t just close your eyes and say, ‘Nothing’s going on, the pandemic is over,'” Herrick says.

Finding solutions to finally make Covid endemic

In March, a major report published by a large group of doctors and public health experts laid out a roadmap for shifting Covid from pandemic to endemic in the U.S. It noted that to reach a “new normal,” Covid death rates would need to roughly match those of influenza — fewer than 165 new deaths per day, on average.

As of Monday, the country’s seven-day average of daily new Covid deaths is 371, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The solution could include vaccines that target specific Covid variants. On Tuesday, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory committee is meeting to discuss the approval of such omicron-specific vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna as booster shots this coming fall, potentially as the first in an annual series of custom boosters.

Mokdad says the clinical trial data for those vaccines bodes well so far — but if you or your child aren’t up-to-date on Covid shots, you shouldn’t wait for a new vaccine to get approved. The sooner the country’s vaccination percentages can rise, he says, the better.

“There is a new vaccine coming up that has been updated to include BA.4, BA.5 or omicron,” he says, “But we shouldn’t wait for a better vaccine to come out. We should vaccinate our kids today and provide them better protection as soon as possible.”

That’s especially important right now: New daily cases are on the rise again, according to Johns Hopkins University data, and that means a new variant of unknown severity could soon emerge.

Thomas Russo, an infectious diseases physician at the University at Buffalo, says those types of unknowns make Covid especially impossible to predict. What we do know, he says, is that vaccinations are currently the most important tool in our pandemic-ending toolbox.

“This virus is not going anywhere, and it’s going to continue to circulate for a number of years, if not forever,” Russo says, “Therefore, the amount of damage it causes is going to be indirectly proportional to the proportion of the population that’s vaccinated.”

Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter

Don’t miss:

Read original article here