Two weaker doses of Pfizer jab to be given, with some scientists calling for all in age group to be vaccinated

Vulnerable children aged 5-11 to be offered Covid jabs

As Paula Zimmerman queued at her gate in Cape Town, a news alert flashed up on her phone, warning about a new variant of COVID-19 that had just been discovered in South Africa.

Omicron was already spreading in the Netherlands before it had a name. Could it have European origins?

Nearly two years into the pandemic, people like me are still out of action. We need better support and more funding

More than a million of us are suffering with long Covid – yet still it’s not taken seriously

10.1126/science.acx9758

Now, another group argues such small, weak trials of public health measures can do more harm than good. Writing in Trials last month, the group argues such studies waste funding and time, and can give a dangerous appearance of certainty. Much research “does not lead anywhere that is useful,” says co-author Noah Haber, an independent study design specialist. “It’s noise at best, and it’s misinformation at worst, because it looks like information.” Other researchers, however, think any evidence is better than none.

‘It’s misinformation at worst.’ Weak health studies can do more harm than good, scientists say

A lot is still unknown around Omicron, but a worrying trend has become clear: This variant sure is spreading fast. In South Africa, the U.K., and Denmark—countries with the best variant surveillance and high immunity against COVID—Omicron cases are growing exponentially. The variant has outcompeted the already highly transmissible Delta in South Africa and may soon do the same elsewhere. According to preliminary estimates, every person with Omicron is infecting 3–3.5 others, which is roughly on par with how fast the coronavirus spread when it first went global in early 2020.

Omicron’s Explosive Growth Is a Warning Sign

64 of 150 people tested positive for Omicron after a Christmas lunch, authorities told Insider. More than 1,000 more were potentially exposed after the November 27 event, Danish officials said.  It is not yet clear how transmissible Omicron is or whether it causes more severe symptoms.

64 of 150 guests tested positive for Omicron after a high school lunch in Denmark, the latest in a string of spreading events

10.1097/01.EEM.0000795760.41732.33

The COVID-19 pandemic has only one exit door, and that is through the exhaustive vaccination of the humans on this planet; at least 80 percent of the population is the amount oft quoted. Leaving aside the thorny issue of global vaccine availability, one of the distressing reasons we are not reaching that sort of percentage is vaccine hesitancy, the term adopted by the World Health Organization. Vaccine hesitancy, of course, is nothing new. It has a long heritage, beginning from when immunizations were first introduced. But before we take a brief jog through history, it is important to distinguish those who are vaccine hesitant from antivaxxers, who are in a league of their own and are involved in dragging many others into their warped world view. They are also not a recent phenomenon, but they tend to fall into a fairly narrow category. Those leading antivaxxer movements, certainly in the past, have tended to be wealthy, middle class, and white, and they had something to gain by promulgating their ideas and influence. Alexander Ross, MD, fought against vaccination in 1885, for example, because it would heighten his own fame and professional standing. Andrew Wakefield, a former physician and the king of fraud and disinformation responsible for falsifying research published in the Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, is another example of that.

What Lies Beneath Tackling Vaccine Hesitancy

Spreading misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has never been more lucrative. The past year has created a thriving online marketplace for unproven COVID-19 “wonder drugs,” fraudulent vaccination cards, fake religious or medical exemptions, and other products geared towards the millions of Americans who follow anti-vaccine groups and influencers, experts testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Wednesday. The congressional hearing on the monetization of COVID-19 misinformation was the latest sign that, 20 months into the coronavirus pandemic, lawmakers are turning their attention beyond combating misinformation to holding those who profit from it accountable.

Congress Is Looking Into Groups Profiting From Fake COVID-19 Drugs After TIME Investigation

We estimate the import risk probability based on the world aviation network from August 2021 (i.e. 3 month prior). The world aviation network contains the number of passengers along all flight connections around the globe. By looking at these passenger numbers, we can estimate how likely it is that the virus spreads to another area: The busier a flight route, the more probable it is that an infected passenger travels this route.

Omicron - Import Risk

If you’re curious how likely #omicron is to have spread from South Africa or Botswana to different places, @DirkBrockmann and colleagues have done some interesting calculations based on the world aviation network from 08/2021 You can see that US seems a very likely destination

The number of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 has surpassed 775K. But left behind are tens of thousands of children — some orphaned entirely — after their parents or a grandparent who cared for them died.

Update: The first doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 have arrived. We’ll have 2.9 million doses in the country by the end of the week - that’s enough for every eligible child to get their first shot. So please, get your kids vaccinated.

Federal regulators on Friday authorized Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccine boosters for all adults, a one-size-fits-all strategy designed to shore up Americans’ defenses against a tenacious virus and reduce confusion over guidelines that have varied based on people’s age, occupation and where they live.The Food and Drug Administration cleared the boosters for people 18 and older who are at least six months past their second shot of the two-dose vaccines. The move reflects an urgent effort to encourage millions of Americans to get the boosters to bolster waning immunity heading into the winter holiday season when millions will travel to see friends and family. It’s also an attempt to put in place a coherent federal approach as about a dozen states move ahead on their own to grant broad access to boosters.

FDA authorizes Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna boosters for all adults