Respiratory Infections News

There have been rare reports of myocarditis and pericarditis among people who have received a COVID-19 messenger RNA vaccine, with cases occurring especially among male adolescents and young adults, according to the CDC.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced new actions to fight the omicron variant, including a promise to purchase 500 million at-home tests and distribute them for free to Americans beginning next month.

After devastating surges in hospitalizations and deaths, many look forward with some relief to the possibility of COVID-19 shifting into an endemic phase, like seasonal influenza.

At this time, it’s unclear whether immunocompromised individuals will need to be boosted with COVID-19 vaccinations at any interval. We currently lack the robust data needed to inform this decision. What is clear, however, is that the immunocompromised need to be treated differently when it comes to COVID-19 vaccination (as is the case with many vaccinations). It has already been shown that they are clearly less likely to respond to standard vaccination regimens and are overrepresented among those with rare breakthrough hospitalizations. These data led to the recommendation that an additional messenger RNA vaccine dose be given to the immunocompromised, extending the primary vaccine series.

My first infectious diseases paper was published when I was 7 months old. Before I was even capable of creating memories and while I was still crawling, my relationship with infectious diseases was off and running.

Most of the emergency use authorizations the FDA issued related to COVID-19 were “not supported by high-quality evidence,” the authors of a cross-sectional study wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Moderna on Monday said that a booster dose of its messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine, given at the authorized dose of 50 µg, offered a 37-fold increase in protection against the omicron variant, compared with pre-boost levels.

WHO has issued two emergency use listings for Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine following the publication of positive results from a phase 3 trial, and the company said it expects to begin submitting data to the FDA by the end of the year.

Stories that focused on emerging research and breaking news related to COVID-19 dominated headlines in 2021.

Amid the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, pediatric researchers have been continuing their examinations into the persisting multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children.