Skepticism toward Covid-19 vaccines could be fueling a “worrisome” rise in broader anti-vax sentiment, doctors have said.

Professor Liam Smeeth, a physician and director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told CNBC he was concerned that vaccine hesitancy around Covid was “creeping into” sentiment toward other vaccines.

“I’m concerned it’s making people think: ‘oh, well, maybe the measles vaccine isn’t great either, and maybe these other vaccines aren’t great,’” Smeeth said in a phone call. “And we don’t have to see much of a drop in measles vaccine coverage in the U.K. to get measles outbreaks.”

He noted that there had been outbreaks of the disease when vaccination rates dropped in Britain in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In the late 1990s, claims that vaccines caused autism “turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine,” according to the Lancet medical journal. In 2010, the journal retracted a 12-year-old article linking vaccines to autism, and studies have proven vaccines do not cause Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Read more at CNBC.

Lee Haywood got the COVID-19 vaccine. He’s seen friends lose their lives to the virus, and watched others struggle to recover. A smoker for 37 years, he believes the medical evidence showing that the vaccine sharply reduces his chances of a severe infection.

Yet on the frigid afternoon of Jan. 23, Haywood, a 61-year-old Republican running for a North Carolina congressional seat, was near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, standing among signs that read “Vaccines kill” and “Stop the Vaccine Holocaust.” He had helped organize a bus carrying 35 people from Greensboro to the capital.

“I’m against the forced vaccinations or forced wearing of these masks by these bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the government,” Haywood says. “This country was founded on liberty, and these mandates just slap everybody in the face.”

Haywood’s presence at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally was a window into a growing political cause that is beginning to unite a host of groups across the right. The anti-vaccine movement, once a fringe cohort, has repositioned itself as an opposition to mandates and government overreach. The distinction has attracted legions of supporters by tapping into the anger, exhaustion, grief and frustration of millions of Americans as the pandemic enters its third year.

Read more at TIME.

Neil Young has demanded that his music be removed from Spotify due to vaccine misinformation spread by podcaster Joe Rogan on the streaming service, saying: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

In an open letter to his manager and record label that was posted to his website and later taken down, Young wrote: “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them. Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”

Young specified that his decision was motivated by The Joe Rogan Experience, which is currently Spotify’s most popular podcast and one of the biggest in the world. Rogan signed a US$100m deal in 2020 giving Spotify exclusive rights to the show.

“With an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, JRE, which is hosted exclusively on Spotify, is the world’s largest podcast and has tremendous influence. Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform, though the company presently has no misinformation policy,” he wrote, adding: “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform … They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Read more at The Guardian.

The Biden administration on Tuesday said it is withdrawing its vaccine-or-test mandate for businesses with at least 100 employees after the Supreme Court earlier this month blocked the requirement from being enforced, ruling that it was a federal overreach.

Given the Supreme Court’s decision, the Biden administration filed a motion on Tuesday to have the existing lawsuits that were filed against the employer vaccine mandate dismissed. Twenty-seven Republican-led states and a coalition of businesses had brought those legal challenges against the mandate.

“The federal government respectfully moves to dismiss the petitions challenging the Vaccination and Testing emergency temporary standard (Vaccination and Testing ETS) issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to address the grave danger of COVID-19 in the workplace,” the Biden administration said in a motion.

Read more at The Hill.

Pfizer and BioNTech on Tuesday launched a clinical trial to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine that targets the Covid omicron variant, as concerns grow that the current shots aren’t holding up against infections and mild illness caused by the strain discovered just over two months ago.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC earlier this month that the company will have a vaccine that targets omicron ready by March. The vaccine will also target the other Covid variants that are circulating, Bourla said.

BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said there’s growing data indicating that the efficacy of the current vaccine against infection and mild-to-moderate disease from omicron is waning more rapidly compared with prior strains of the virus. The goal is to develop a vaccine that provides durable protection against omicron, Sahin said in a statement Tuesday.

Read more at CNBC.

DENVER — During the weekend of January 22, residents in Denver, Arvada and Castle Rock woke up to what many of them described as appalling. 

“Who gets up in the morning and decides to do something like this? Who plans their day around doing something so awful?” said a Denver Country Club resident who asked to remain anonymous. 

Antisemitic and anti-vaccine flyers were left on various doorsteps and sidewalks, stored in plastic baggies and weighed down with rice. One flyer shows a picture of three women next to two QR codes and the words “Save Your Race.” The other one includes the message “Every single aspect of the COVID agenda is Jewish.”

Similar leaflets were also distributed in neighborhoods in Texas, Florida, California and Maryland. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — an organization that tracks antisemitic assaults, vandalism and harassment nationally — believes a loose network of antisemitic individuals organized the flyer distribution. Police are investigating the incident. 

Read more at Rocky Mountain PBS.

he average daily rate of Americans receiving COVID booster shots has fallen by half since a peak of about 1 million people getting boosters per day in December to about 490,000 as of last week, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.

About 63 percent of Americans, amounting to about 210 million people, have been fully vaccinated in just over a year since the COVID vaccination program began in the U.S., according to the CDC. However, only 84 million of those people, or about 40 percent of fully vaccinated individuals, have received a booster shot since they became available late last year.

Research has shown that booster doses can provide protection against COVID, especially the Omicron variant, which has proven to be more vaccine resistant than prior variants, the Associated Press reported.

In Colorado, the state health department reported that those who had received a booster shot were about 7 times less likely to be hospitalized than those who were fully vaccinated, and about 46 times less likely than unvaccinated individuals, according to Axios.

Read more at Newsweek.

The two most successful coronavirus vaccines developed in the U.S. – the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – are both mRNA vaccines. The idea of using genetic material to produce an immune response has opened up a world of research and potential medical uses far out of reach of traditional vaccines. Deborah Fuller is a microbiologist at the University of Washington who has been studying genetic vaccines for more than 20 years. We spoke to her about the future of mRNA vaccines for The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Below are excerpts from that conversation which have been edited for length and clarity.

How long have gene-based vaccines been in development?

This type of vaccine has been in the works for about 30 years. Nucleic acid vaccines are based on the idea that DNA makes RNA and then RNA makes proteins. For any given protein, once we know the genetic sequence or code, we can design an mRNA or DNA molecule that prompts a person’s cells to start making it.

When we first thought about this idea of putting a genetic code into somebody’s cells, we were studying both DNA and RNA. The mRNA vaccines did not work very well at first. They were unstable and they caused pretty strong immune responses that were not necessarily desirable. For a very long time DNA vaccines took the front seat, and the very first clinical trials were with a DNA vaccine.

Read more at The Conversation.

Despite new data showing the effectiveness of boosters and the skyrocketing number of COVID-19 cases due to the more infectious omicron variant, the CDC has no plans to change its definition of “fully vaccinated.” The term still means two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer mRNA vaccines or one shot of Johnson & Johnson. Instead, the agency is pivoting to the more general descriptor of “up to date” to describe effective vaccine protection.

At Friday’s White House press briefing, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was asked by CNN, “Can you explain why the CDC is not changing the definition of ‘fully vaccinated,’ given that could potentially encourage more people to get a third shot?” The US has currently boosted 85.5 million people, or about 40% of people considered fully vaccinated.

Walensky responded: “In public health, for all vaccines, we’ve talked about being up to date for your vaccines. Every year, you need a flu shot; you’re not up to date with your flu shot until you’ve gotten your flu shot for that year. … What we really are working to do is pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be.”

Read more at CNET.

When thousands of protesters gathered on the National Mall on Sunday morning to protest Covid vaccine mandates, they did so, they insisted, to preserve personal freedoms. “No more mandates!” they shouted as they marched, serpentine and coiled, like the snakes on the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags hoisted above their heads. “This is not about vaccine or anti-vax,” JP Sears, a comedian known for spreading conspiracy theories through sarcastic comedy, told the crowd. It was, he asserted, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

But it was, very much, about vaccines. Children’s Health Defense Fund, the political wing of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vax organization, hosted the event. Kennedy, who has been vocally spreading false claims about vaccine safety for decades, addressed the crowd to offer unsubstantiated warnings of the Covid-19 vaccines’ dangers. So did several doctors, wearing their physician whites, who also touted ivermectin to prevent Covid (it won’t) and rehashed long-debunked studies suggesting vaccines cause autism (it doesn’t). Just days after the CDC released its first study showing vaccine boosters help protect patients against hospitalization from Omicron, Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and well-known vaccine skeptic, falsely told the crowd: “The science is settled: they’re not working.”

Read more at Rolling Stone.