Read more at TIME.

As we enter another year of this wretched pandemic that has killed more than 6 million the divide between the vaccine haves and have-nots is not only huge, it’s growing.

Across the US and Europe, where governments outbid others to procure sufficient supplies of vaccines for their populations, people are starting to gather with friends and family and travel more freely, planning long-awaited vacations to break out of “pandemic fatigue.” But there are billions of people around the world, including health workers, still waiting to be fully vaccinated and trapped in the cycle of outbreaks, lockdowns, disease, and death. The vaccine have-nots continue to wait, anxious, tired, only dreaming about traveling to reunite with loved ones or unable to attend funerals of those they lost.

This divide was not an inevitable consequence of the pandemic. It can and should be bridged.

For over 17 months, governments of high-income countries like the US, Switzerland, and EU member states have appeared at the World Trade Organization (WTO) assuring that the pharmaceutical industry would deliver on global availability of vaccines, testing, and treatments. But the rules that make it difficult to expand and diversify production of Covid-19 testing, treatments, and vaccines are still in place and a proposal to temporarily waive these rules, backed by over 100 low-and-middle income governments, remains stalled at the WTO.

Read more at Human Rights Watch.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) agency recently issued a public health notice regarding the prevention and control of infectious diseases related to visitors from Ukraine.

On March 8, 2022, the ECDC reported a large number of people from Ukraine are entering the European Union (EU) countries Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia. Unfortunately, many of those people, mainly women and children, are under-vaccinated against infectious diseases.

The ECDC stated, ‘Ensuring continuity of routine vaccinations and addressing gaps in prior vaccination histories is an essential element of the public health support for displaced people.’

‘In this context, ensuring vaccination coverage against poliomyelitis, measles, tuberculosis, and COVID-19 should be a priority.’

Read more at Precision Vaccinations.

Despite being among the first eligible for COVID-19 booster shots, many nursing homes are struggling to boost residents and staff, experts say.

Nationally, about 72% of residents are boosted in each nursing home, according to data from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services.MORE: Gap in COVID-19 vaccine uptake between urban and rural areas in the US continues to widen: CDC

But in about one-third of U.S. states, booster rates for residents are less than the national average among nursing homes, and three states have yet to crack an average of 60% of residents boosted in each facility.

Booster shots have been shown to be more protective against omicron and other COVID-19 variants. And nursing home residents continue to be among the most vulnerable people in terms of potential for severe illness and death — nearly 151,000 people in nursing homes have died since the beginning of the pandemic, CMS data shows.

Read more at ABC News.

For American parents, particularly those with young children, the last couple of months have been dizzying and beyond frustrating.

In early February, federal regulators announced that they would evaluate Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for the youngest children — only to scrap that plan 10 days later, citing doubts about the vaccine’s effectiveness in that age group.

Soon after, scientists reported that the vaccine was only weakly protective against infection with the Omicron variant among children aged 5 to 11 and that it appeared to offer little defense against moderate Covid illness among adolescents aged 12 to 17.

On Monday, citing these data, Florida’s surgeon general declared that healthy children need not be immunized, advice that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, called “deeply disturbing.”

Read more at The New York Times.

This season’s flu vaccine offers meager protection against mild cases of influenza, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

Against the most common flu strain circulating this season, the flu shot reduced a person’s chance of getting a mild case by 16 percent, which is “considered not statistically significant,” the CDC authors wrote, though the shots should offer some protection against more severe illness.

Full coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic

Put more bluntly, the flu vaccine was “essentially ineffective,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Indeed, research from earlier in the flu season found that the vaccine was a poor match for the H3N2 strain of the virus. That study, from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, was posted as a pre-print, meaning it had not been peer-reviewed.

Read more at NBC News.

In September 1957—two years after church bells rang in celebration of the new polio vaccine, two years after people rejoiced in the streets, two years after Americans began lining up for their shots—the proportion of children fully vaccinated against polio remained at about 50 percent.

Supply was not the problem. Nor were doubts about the vaccine’s safety or efficacy, concluded a report from around that time by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes, which had funded research into the vaccine. But the “initial excitement” had nevertheless “faded,” and vaccine proponents found themselves in an incremental slog to reach the remaining unvaccinated Americans. Well into the 1960s, doctors held “Sabin Oral Sundays,” dispensing sugar cubes dosed with a drop of the oral vaccine invented by Albert Sabin. It would ultimately take more than two decades to go from ringing church bells to polio eradication in the U.S.

Today, with COVID vaccinations stalled and rates in children particularly low, the COVID vaccination campaign has drawn comparisons, usually unfavorable, to that for polio. But history has a way of flattening lengths of time. Vaccine uptake in children has never been immediately universal—not for polio, not for measles, chickenpox, HPV, or any other childhood shot. In the past, vaccines have routinely taken years to go from FDA approval to being mandated in schools to high vaccination rates. COVID vaccines, meanwhile, have been available for kids under 16 for mere months, and only under emergency use. In this time, the most enthusiastic have gotten their two shots, amounting to some 26 percent of children ages 5 to 11 and 57 percent of teens ages 12 to 17. These rates, which are so far below that of adults that they suggest many vaccinated parents aren’t vaccinating their kids yet, have already prompted much hand-wringing for being too low.

Read more at The Atlantic.

While parents await the outcome of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for kids under 5 years old, others may be struggling to catch up with standard vaccinations for their young children. Especially for children born during the pandemic, lockdowns and missed doctor’s appointments may have delayed immunizations for diseases like measles, whooping cough and polio. 

Pre-pandemic, these vaccination rates were high, with most in the 80 percent range. However, at the beginning of the pandemic, the rates for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine dropped from 72 percent in March 2017 to March 2020 to as low as 62 percent by June to August 2020, according to a study published in Pediatrics. A study of European countries found that 22 percent of infants had their vaccination regimens interrupted during the spring of 2020. 

As might be expected, lockdowns early in the pandemic kept people away from their regular appointments, and with most children taking part in remote learning for much of 2020 and part of 2021, there was less of a reason to get vaccinated. 

Read more at The Hill.

routine childhood vaccination, the MMR vaccine protects against measles, mumps, and rubella: three diseases that once put American children at risk of death or permanent disability. Before the vaccine, nearly all children contracted measles because it was so infectious. Each year, 400 to 500 children died of the disease and 48,000 were hospitalized. Mumps was similarly virulent; before immunization, it was considered the most common cause of hearing loss and meningitis in children. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in just one year before the vaccine became available, 12.5 million Americans contracted rubella, or German measles, which triggered an estimated 11,000 miscarriages and 2,100 newborn deaths. 

But today, through the wonders of modern medicine, parents are, for the most part, unaware of the trauma these diseases caused just half a century ago. And in so many ways, the MMR vaccine is a victim of its own success. Since all three diseases have been largely eradicated in the United States due to widespread vaccination, it’s easy to forget the devastation they once caused — until outbreaks caused by anti-vaxxers propel these preventable diseases into the limelight.

Read more at Fatherly.

A review of adverse events following vaccination against COVID-19 with mRNA vaccines in the USA confirms that most side effects were mild and decreased substantially after one day. The new study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, suggests that for more than 298 million vaccine doses administered between December 2020 and June 2021, 92% (313,499/340,522) of reported adverse events were not serious, and less than 1% of v-safe participants reported seeking any medical care following vaccination.

In December 2020 two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines – Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT162b2) and Moderna (mRNA-1723) – were authorised for emergency use in the USA. Both vaccines involved two primary doses and have shown good safety profiles in clinical trials, with mild effects such as injection site pain, fatigue, and headache being reported as the most common adverse events.

Read more at Technology Networks.