Login
As Interest From Families Wanes, Pediatricians Scale Back on COVID Shots
When pediatrician Eric Ball opened a refrigerator full of childhood vaccines, all the expected shots were there — DTaP, polio, pneumococcal vaccine — except one.
“This is where we usually store our COVID-19 vaccines, but we don’t have any right now because they all expired at the end of last year and we had to dispose of them,” said Ball, who is part of a pediatric practice in Orange County, California.
“We thought demand would be way higher than it was.”
Pediatricians across the country are pre-ordering the updated and reformulated COVID-19 vaccine for the fall and winter respiratory virus season, but some doctors said they’re struggling to predict whether parents will be interested.
Providers like Ball don’t want to waste money ordering doses that won’t be used, but they need enough on hand to vaccinate vulnerable children.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that anyone 6 months or older get the updated COVID-19 vaccination, but in the 2023-24 vaccination season only about 15% of eligible children in the U.S. got a shot.
Researchers Say There’s Something Fishy With All These Studies Showing Huge Health Benefits From Ozempic-Like Drugs
It seems like every week, there’s a new headline about the health benefits of GLP-1s, the new class of injectable weight loss drugs like semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy.
However, in a new editorial published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, a group of public health specialists pointed out that the companies funding the research into these drugs and their safety are often the same ones making billions of dollars from their runaway popularity.
In their commentary, the Duke-led group of health researchers suggest that there’s a glaring conflict of interest when companies like Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, initiate research into the safety and efficacy of these drugs.
As these experts point out, studies have shown that “clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies are more likely to yield favorable results for company products than independent trials.”
New Study Provides Insight to Why COVID Vaccines Hit Some Harder Than Others
When you got the SARS-CoV2 vaccine to protect against COVID-19, you may have experienced severe side effects. Or maybe you didn’t.
Catherine Andersen, associate professor of nutritional sciences in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, published a paper highlighting factors that may explain why some people perceived more side effects than others including stress, exercise, and use of hormonal birth control.
This study was published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Research.
Concerns about potential side effects were a major barrier for some people to getting the vaccine at all, yet little research had been done on what could make someone more vulnerable to experiencing side effects.
“We thought that was interesting because there was a lot of research coming out about sex-specific differences and COVID-19 illness severity but less about responsiveness and side effects to vaccines,” Andersen says.
Given all of this, they decided to see if sex, hormonal birth control use, diet, body mass index, or exercise impacted someone’s experience of post-vaccine symptoms.
“It just got us thinking more about personalized health and whether certain characteristics could be playing a role here,” Andersen says.
Johnson & Johnson Adds $1.1 Billion to Proposed Talc Settlement
Johnson & Johnson (J&J) plans to pay an additional $1.1 billion to resolve tens of thousands of legal actions alleging its baby powder and other talc products caused cancer, two people familiar with the matter said.
The increase would boost the size of the settlement to more than $9 billion paid over 25 years. J&J on Wednesday said it reached an agreement with a plaintiffs’ lawyer representing 12,000 clients to recommend the settlement offer to them, adding to support already received from other claimants.
The healthcare giant is preparing to have a subsidiary declare bankruptcy to finalize the proposed settlement before the end of this month, one of the people said. J&J would continue operating without filing for Chapter 11.
The company maintains its talc products are safe and do not cause cancer.
Congo Receives Long-Awaited Mpox Vaccine Doses
Democratic Republic of Congo received its first batch of mpox vaccines on Thursday, which health authorities hope will help curb an outbreak that has prompted the U.N. to declare a global public health emergency.
Congo is the epicenter of the outbreak, which has spread to neighboring countries and elsewhere, but a lack of vaccines in Africa has hampered efforts to stop the spread of the sometimes deadly disease.
A plane carrying doses manufactured by Bavarian Nordic and donated by the European Union touched down in the capital Kinshasa around 13:00 local time (12:00 GMT), Reuters reporters at the airport said.
Congo has said it will launch its vaccination campaign on Oct. 8 to allow time for a thorough awareness-raising campaign to overcome mistrust in some communities.
