Top in ID: AstraZeneca vaccine, bamlanivimab, MIS-C

Last week, AstraZeneca released data on its COVID-19 vaccine candidate and said it will submit the vaccine to the FDA for emergency use authorization in the coming weeks. It was the top story in infectious disease.

Another top story was about an update from HHS on the use of the monoclonal antibody bamlanivimab (Eli Lilly) in patients with COVID-19. The U.S. government, in collaboration with Eli Lilly, has halted the distribution of bamlanivimab alone to treat COVID-19 because of concerns about emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Read these and more top stories in infectious disease below:

In revised estimate, AstraZeneca says vaccine’s efficacy is 76%

In a revised estimate, AstraZeneca said in a news release Thursday that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate demonstrated an overall efficacy of 76% against symptomatic disease in a phase 3 trial conducted mostly in the United States. Read more.

Feds halt distribution of Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab alone for COVID-19

HHS said the government stopped distributing bamlanivimab alone to treat COVID-19 due to a “sustained increase in SARS-CoV-2 viral variants in the United States that are resistant to bamlanivimab administered alone, and the availability of other authorized monoclonal antibody therapies that are expected to retain activity to these variants.” Read more.

Will SARS-CoV-2 variants impact the severity of MIS-C?

The emergence of COVID-19 variants has raised questions about the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, including whether vaccine efficacy will be impacted. In this article, Tina Q. Tan, MD, professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a pediatric infectious disease physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, discusses the impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants on the severity of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C. Read more.

SARS-CoV-2 triggers similar inflammatory syndromes in children and adults

Healio spoke with experts about the known and unknown clinical aspects of MIS-C and a similar illness in adults called MIS-A. Read more.

‘New entity’ of COVID-19-associated aspergillosis linked to poor outcomes

Patients with COVID-19-associated pulmonary aspergillosis experience worse outcomes than patients with COVID-19 who do not have the fungal infection, according to study results published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. Read more.