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Poll: Most Parents of Kids Under 5 Have No Plans to Give Them COVID Shots
Most parents of young children do not plan to get them vaccinated against COVID-19, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation released Tuesday.
More than 40% of parents of children under 5 said they will “definitely not” vaccinate their kids, compared to about 10% who said they want to get their kids vaccinated as soon as possible, according to Kaiser’s latest survey. Only 7% said they already have gotten their kids vaccinated.
The hesitation isn’t just coming from people who are unvaccinated. Even among parents who are vaccinated, about one in four said they will “definitely not” get their young child their shots, according to the poll.
Many parents expressed concerns about the newness of the vaccine and not enough testing or research, according to the poll. There were also concerns over side effects, and worries over the overall safety of the vaccines.
Biden’s COVID Diagnosis Is Proof Vaccines Aren’t Enough to Fight Virus
President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 diagnosis is the latest data point showing our government’s “vaccine only” approach needs an immediate course correction. If four doses of a vaccine cannot protect the leader of the free world from infection, it is time to consider other tactics.
These measures should include generic medicines that have been dismissed by the mainstream medical community and media.
Don’t take my word for it. Use Biden’s own standard for success. Exactly one year before testing positive, the President declared, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
The push for vaccines from the administration has continued unabated. Following Biden’s diagnosis, the White House tried to take a political victory lap. In their first press briefing following news of the diagnosis, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed the president’s vaccination status as, “what’s most important here.”
Worker’s ‘I Have COVID’ Sign Slams Management Who ‘Says It’s OK to Work’
An alarming sign taped to a gas station store on Sunday warned customers of the potential health risk waiting inside.
Eric Coble works at a gas station convenience store in New York state, according to his social media. He fell sick with COVID-19 and continued to suffer from serious symptoms over a week later, but his manager ordered him back to work, he said. Since he had no choice in exposing patrons, he decided to issue the public health warning himself.
His video of the sign taped to his store door has amassed 1.2 million views on TikTok.
“I have COVID, but management says it’s OK to work,” the sign said. Coble tested positive again on July 23. He told his manager, but she said that time was up. He recalled her saying, “‘Since you’re vaccinated and boosted, you only need the five days the CDC says to take off.'”
Monkeypox Cases in NYC Surpass 1K, Says Health Department
The number of people who’ve tested positive for monkeypox in New York City surpassed 1,000 on Monday — a deeply worrying milestone as the Big Apple continues its efforts to manage that disease and COVID-19 simultaneously.
According to the city Health Department, 1,040 people have tested positive for monkeypox as of Monday — a jump of about 200 compared with the city’s official count of 839 on Friday.
That spike comes just two days after the World Health Organization labeled monkeypox a “public health emergency of international concern,” the highest alert designation the entity has and one shared by only two other diseases — COVID and polio.
Omicron BA.5 Makes up 82% of COVID Variants in U.S. — CDC
The BA.5 subvariant of Omicron was estimated to make up 81.9% of the circulating coronavirus variants in the United States for the week ended July 23, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Tuesday.
Omicron subvariant BA.4 was estimated to make up 12.9% of the circulating variants in the United States, the data showed.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked vaccine manufacturers to target the two currently dominant subvariants for a potential fall season booster dose.
Fauci Holds up BA.5 Booster as Best Approach to Handling COVID This Fall
Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on Monday that a COVID-19 vaccine booster specific to the BA.5 Omicron subvariant — which is currently dominant in the U.S. — is the “best guess” for dealing with the virus this fall amid the ever-evolving coronavirus pandemic.
Appearing on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Fauci reiterated that it is difficult to predict how SARS-CoV-2 will mutate and noted that the U.S. is currently in a “BA.5 mode,” with roughly 80% of cases caused by the subvariant.
Both Pfizer and Moderna have said they are working on BA.5 specific boosters that should be ready by the fall.
Fauci said the Food and Drug Administration will likely authorize these updated boosters heading into the fall, adding that they would be bivalent vaccines, meaning that they would target BA.5 along with the ancestral strain of COVID-19.
These Vaccines Will Take Aim at COVID — and Its Entire SARS Lineage
Early in the pandemic, vaccination or a bout with COVID-19 seemed to ward off the risk of another infection. But now, new viral variants are increasingly able to dodge that hard-earned protection. Keeping track of those variants and how they escape immune protection is an exhausting game, one that scientists would like to squelch with a new type of vaccine the virus hasn’t managed to out-evolve.
Scientists have tried several routes to attack the problem. The narrowest starts with the existing COVID mRNA vaccines and seeks to create updated boosters that target the virus’s most recent variants, an effort that drugmakers Moderna and Pfizer are attempting with Omicron’s progeny.
The broadest, most ambitious route is to invent a vaccine that would target the entire coronavirus family, including the merbecoviruses that cause MERS, the embecoviruses responsible for ordinary colds and the sarbecovirus subgenus that gave rise to both COVID and the original SARS virus that broke out in 2002.
But there’s a middle path: a vaccine that would attack just the sarbecoviruses, meaning the COVID virus and all of its future offspring, as well as any new SARS-CoV siblings that might appear in the future.
Is the War Against COVID Variants Won in the Nose?
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The best booster for COVID vaccinations might not be yet another shot, but a nasal spray, an early study hints.
Since early on in the pandemic, some researchers have speculated that the most effective way to fight COVID is through vaccines that not only spur an immune response in the blood, but also in the mucus membranes of the nose and the rest of the respiratory tract.
That type of immune response, called mucosal immunity, meets viruses at their entry point into the body. In theory, a nasal-spray vaccine could help the body mount a stronger initial defense against SARS-CoV-2 — keeping it from breaching the gates, explained Jie Sun, the lead researcher on the new study.
Such a vaccine, given as a booster after mRNA vaccination, could potentially prevent “breakthrough” infections and transmission of the virus, said Sun, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
Biden Administration Weighs Declaring Monkeypox a Health Emergency
The Biden administration is weighing whether to declare the nation’s monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency and also plans to name a White House coordinator to oversee the response as officials attempt to keep the virus from becoming entrenched in the United States.
White House and health agency leaders deliberated through the weekend about their next steps to fight the virus, after the World Health Organization on Saturday declared monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the agency’s highest-level warning.
Almost 18,000 cases have been confirmed outside of Africa since May — including nearly 3,500 in the United States — as infections continue to climb in countries where the virus is not historically found.
Cory Franklin and Robert Weinstein: Herd Immunity Against COVID Is Unlikely. But We Aren’t Powerless.
What went wrong with the herd immunity theory? In essence, two things. First, vaccine protection is incomplete and does not last long enough. Second, the virus is constantly mutating to circumvent vaccine protection.
The theory of herd immunity, like all scientific theories, depends on several assumptions, and these assumptions proved not to be true in real life. The first fallacy was that people who have acquired immunity would not acquire or pass on the disease; they must remain resistant.
One year ago, after a July 4 gathering in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where nearly everyone was vaccinated, about 1,000 people came down with COVID-19. That disproved the assumption that vaccinated individuals could not acquire or transmit COVID-19. We have since learned that vaccine-induced immunity wanes over time, thus prompting the need for booster shots, which themselves wane in effectiveness over time.
