Articles related to VACCINES/IMMUNIZATION

A look into the results of a few patients that took part in a phase 1/2 trial at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City: a woman who had breast cancer for 23 years and gone through 12 lines of therapy and a man with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) since 2017. Both showed complete response to the novel vaccine.

Maternal immunization with 2 doses of vaccine was 97% and 53% effective against infant hospitalization from delta and omicron variants, respectively. The effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing infant hospitalization declined by nearly 20% after 16 weeks. Receiving the second dose in the third trimester yielded the greatest benefit.

There is much we don’t know because of weak surveillance methods. For informed decisions, medicine needs a better understanding of what is happening and what is working at any given time. Since even with 100% vaccination, the virus will at minimum continue in circulation, a key goal is to focus on those who are most at risk for severe disease and learn how to strengthen their immunity.

Reports on the Vaccine Safety Datalink flagged the need to investigate a potential increased risk those 65 years of age and older, for ischemic stroke in the first 21 days after receiving the bivalent Pfizer-BioNTech booster. FDA has parallel monitoring systems to confirm or fail to validate a safety signal. In this case, those other systems did not confirm the Vaccine Safety Datalink flag.

Per this Nature article highlighted on MashupMD, inadequate funding plus fears of rebound and side effects are hobbling the availability and use of this potentially lifesaving antiviral.

The original monovalent vaccines continue to protect against serious disease from the new variants. If SARS-CoV-2 variants evolve to resist the protection against severe disease offered by vaccination or previous infection, then variant-specific vaccines will be needed. Otherwise, this authority recommends we “stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.”