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Bivalent COVID Boosters Offer No Extra Protection, Studies Suggest
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters intended to defend people against emerging Omicron variants don’t appear to provide any better protection than the original shot does, two new studies find.
The new mRNA bivalent boosters produced by Moderna and Pfizer only attack the COVID-19 virus about as well as the companies’ first-wave vaccines, according to a blood testing study led by renowned virologist Dr. David Ho, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, in New York City.
The bivalent shots also failed to promote higher antibody levels or a better immune response than the original COVID-19 vaccines, according to another study led by Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston. Both studies were published online on Jan. 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It appears that human immune systems “imprint” after exposure to the first mRNA COVID vaccines, experts say. They are primed to respond to aspects of the original COVID-19 strain that are shared by all the variants, rather than the novel mutations sported by newer variants.
Seniors Shrug off White House Urgent Pleas to Get Vaccinated as New Variant Spreads
Less than 40% of people over 65 have taken the updated booster shot that became available in the fall, according to the CDC, leaving millions with little protection against the latest strain sweeping the U.S.
The Biden administration — which is growing frustrated with the low vaccination rates in nursing homes — is forwarding lists of senior facilities with zero people vaccinated to state regulators for review and possible penalties, which could include fines. The administration is also contacting governors to push them to boost their immunization rates.
The surge, fueled, in part, by holiday gatherings and the new, rapidly transmissible variant XBB.1.5 are concerning enough to White House officials that they plan to make a renewed push in the coming month targeted at older Americans who they view as particularly vulnerable to the virus after a six-week push leading up to New Year’s produced modest results.
Younger, Healthy People Don’t Need Another COVID Booster, Vaccine Expert Says
A key adviser to the Food and Drug Administration‘s vaccine panel is questioning whether more COVID booster shots are necessary for healthy, younger people.
The evidence for the new versions of the vaccines for the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which the FDA authorized in August, is “underwhelming” and fails to show they are much better than the original shots, Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician who is a leading vaccine and infectious diseases expert, wrote Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The updated boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are probably best reserved for people at high risk of severe illness or death from COVID — older adults, people with multiple coexisting conditions and those who are immunocompromised, Offit said.
Asking young, healthy people who have a lower risk of serious illness to get boosted with a variant-specific vaccine, followed by a different variant-specific formula a few months later, may not be practical, he said.
National Security Experts Criticize Media, Scientists Who Dismissed COVID Lab Leak Theory in Open Letter
A group of 43 national security experts published an open letter on Jan. 11 criticizing news organizations and scientific publications that dismissed the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic might have been the result of a lab leak.
The letter is addressed “To the editors, authors, and contributors to major scientific, medical, and journalistic publications worldwide.” The addressees include The Lancet, Nature Medicine, The New York Times and TIME magazine.
“Leading scientific journals censored dissenting voices; many science writers at major news outlets promoted narratives or asserted conclusions unsubstantiated by evidence; reporters failed to make even cursory attempts at surfacing potential conflicts of interest of their sources,” the letter states.
“This served to hamper national and international policy discussions about how to mitigate against future pandemics of any origin — natural, accidental or deliberate.” The letter faults editors and reporters at news organizations and scientific publications for stifling debate on the origins of the virus.
What Do We Know About COVID and Children?
Incidents of critical COVID-19 in children remain rare, even though the Delta and Omicron variants have proved considerably more adept at infecting children than previous variants. In the early stages of the pandemic, estimates indicated that children were less likely to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the first place. And one of the first major retrospective studies about children and COVID-19, by Chinese scientists in the first year of the pandemic, found that up to 90% of pediatric cases were asymptomatic, mild or moderate.
“Children are more likely than adults to have asymptomatic or mild infections,” says Anna Sick-Samuels, assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical School. “The majority of children hospitalized with severe COVID-19 have been unvaccinated, and many have had additional comorbidities.” Sick-Samuels describes children with type 2 diabetes or obesity as being most at risk of developing severe COVID-19. U.K. studies have found children with neuro disabilities or multiple comorbidities to be especially vulnerable to hospital admission or death.
Children produce more interferons at the mucosal surface, which rapidly alert the immune system at the first sign of infection, making it harder for the virus to penetrate the body. They are also thought to have a faster innate immune response, because their T cells are mostly untrained, giving them a greater capacity to respond to novel viruses. In addition, they might have acquired specific antibodies or memory cells through previous exposure to the endemic coronaviruses that commonly circulate among infants.
This layer of immunity has been found to be more active in the parents of infants and toddlers than in other adults. One study found that adults who live in households with young children are less likely to have severe COVID-19, potentially owing to acquired immunity from regular coronavirus infections.
Omicron XBB.1.5 Does Not Have Mutations Known to Make People Sicker, WHO Says
The Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant does not have any mutations known to make people sicker when they catch the virus, according to a World Health Organization risk assessment published Wednesday.
But the WHO noted in the report that it doesn’t have any real-world data on how XBB.1.5 is affecting patients’ health, so it cannot draw any conclusions at this time about the severity of the subvariant.
The WHO said XBB.1.5 is one of the COVID subvariants that is most adept at dodging immunity from vaccination or infection. It is just as immune evasive as another subvariant in its family, XBB.1, which was the COVID variant that best dodged antibodies that block infections.
In the U.S., XBB.1.5 is the only subvariant showing substantial growth right now. It rose from about 2% of cases in early December to nearly 28% in the first week of January, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is causing more than 70% of new COVID cases in the Northeast.
Coronavirus ‘Chimera’ Made in Lab Shows What Makes Omicron Seemingly Less Deadly
A controversial coronavirus experiment at Boston University has identified a mutation in the Omicron variant that might help explain why it doesn’t appear to be as likely to sicken or kill as the original strain that emerged in China. The finding could offer scientists a new target for designing therapies that limit the severity of COVID.
The report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, comes three months after researchers posted an early version of the study that ignited a media firestorm, as well as confusion over who, exactly, funded the work and whether it required greater government oversight.
In a lab experiment, the researchers combined the spike protein of an early lineage of Omicron with the backbone of the original strain that emerged in Wuhan, China. The work, though not significantly different from numerous other experiments, drew media attention and set off fears that such manipulation of the coronavirus could unleash a more dangerous variant.
The research showed that Omicron’s heavily mutated spike protein plays a role in making the variant less pathogenic than the ancestral strain. But the behavior of Omi-S suggested to lead researcher Mohsan Saeed, an assistant professor of biochemistry at Boston University, and other co-authors of the study that there had to be something else contributing to the phenomenon.
The researchers kept experimenting, and now they claim to have found at least one missing piece of the puzzle: a mutation involving a protein called nsp6. Unlike the spike protein studded across the surface of the coronavirus,nsp6 is a “nonstructural” protein, as its name suggests. Researchers point out that many proteins encoded by SARS-CoV-2 are not part of the mainframe of the coronavirus but instead interact with the host in ways that are often mysterious.
Study: Long COVID Symptoms May Ease Within a Year
People experiencing long COVID may see their symptoms ease within a year, per a study published in BMJ medical journal Wednesday.
The big picture: The outcome of this new study may provide some hope for the millions of people left newly disabled during the pandemic with a lingering illness that has no effective treatment.
What they did: Researchers, including study author Maytal Bivas-Benita, analyzed health records in Israel for nearly 2 million people who sought a COVID-19 test from March 2020 until October 2021, seeking documentation of symptoms lasting more than one month.
Most symptoms from long COVID cleared up within 12 months for the people who had mild initial infections, the study found.
Required Vaccine Coverage Among Kindergarteners Drops for Second Year in a Row
Vaccination rates for measles and other diseases dropped again last school year, according to a study published on Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Coverage against measles dropped to the lowest it’s been in more than a decade.
School requirements do not include the COVID-19 vaccine, which is explicitly banned from being included in school mandates in at least 20 states. However, the COVID-19 vaccine will become part of the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule for both children and adults this year.
About 93% of kindergarteners enrolled in the 2021-22 school year had received the required vaccines — including measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis (DTaP), and polio. Coverage fell for the second year in a row amid the COVID-19 pandemic, down from about 94% the previous year and below the federal target of 95%.
A recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation separately found that more than a third of parents oppose vaccine requirements in schools, even if the option for individual choice could create health risks.
