Hospital Medicine News

The FDA on Wednesday issued an emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s Paxlovid, making it the first available oral antiviral treatment for COVID-19.

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.

The monoclonal antibody bamlanivimab may be effective in treating hospitalized patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection if they have no detectable levels of endogenous neutralizing antibodies prior to administration, according to researchers.

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.

Pregnant women with a physical, intellectual or sensory disability had a significantly higher risk for adverse outcomes compared with pregnant women without a disability, according to findings published in JAMA Network Open.

About three in 20 health care workers reported vaccine hesitancy during the initial rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, according to survey results published in the American Journal of Infection Control.

In a recent MMWR report, members of the CDC’s COVID-19 Response Team provided details on the first 43 confirmed infections in the United States caused by the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.

Results from the CONTAIN COVID-19 trial showed that convalescent plasma did not meet prespecified efficacy endpoints in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

About one in 333 women experienced a severe maternal morbidity event or illness during postpartum that could have resulted in death, according to findings published in JAMA Network Open.

Discontinuing contact precautions for MRSA and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus did not lead to an increase in hospital-associated infections in a Pennsylvania hospital system, according to a study.