On Thursday, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (or VRBPAC) met to discuss the future of COVID-19 vaccines. While the committee readily agreed that our current, Omicron-specific shots are working well and should be used more broadly, it had a hard time answering other questions about future vaccine regimens—largely due to a lack of good data.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of December 11 include America’s Health Rankings, bivalent boosters for kids, and more.
Read MoreSources and updates for the week of December 4 include new CDC grants to support public health infrastructure, breakthrough COVID-19 deaths, monoclonal antibodies, and more.
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New, Omicron-specific booster shots are publicly available for all American adults who’ve been previously vaccinated. But awareness of the shots and uptake so far are both incredibly low.
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This week, the FDA and CDC authorized new booster shots from both Pfizer and Moderna that are tweaked to specifically target Omicron BA.4 and BA.5. Here are some data considerations for the new boosters.
Read MoreFeatured sources for the week of January 30 include hospital capacity by state and county, wastewater monitoring, prisoners released in 2020, and vaccine requirements.
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In January, COVAX set a goal that many global health advocates considered modest: delivering 2.3 billion vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021. is saying it’ll deliver just 800 million vaccine doses by the end of 2021, according to the Washington Post, and only about 600 million had been delivered by early December.
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It’s been about a month since the FDA and CDC authorized a version of Pfizer’s vaccine for children ages five to 11. Those kids whose parents immediately took them to get vaccinated are now eligible for their second doses, and will be considered fully vaccinated by Christmas. Despite widespread availability of the shots, vaccine uptake has varied wildly.
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This weekend, I set out to see what data are now available on these booster shots. I updated my vaccination data in the U.S. resource page, which includes detailed annotations on every state’s vaccine reporting along with several national and international sources.
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An excellent article in the Financial Times, published this past Monday, illuminates one major challenge of estimating a vaccine campaign’s success: population data are not always reliable. Health reporter Oliver Barnes and data reporter John Burn-Murdoch explain that, in several countries and smaller regions, inaccurate counts of how many people live in the region have led to vaccination rate estimates that make the area’s vaccine campaign look more successful—or less successful—than it really is.
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