The U.S. government will pay the vaccine maker Moderna $176 million to develop a pandemic vaccine that could be used to treat bird flu in people as cases in dairy cows continue to mount across the country, federal officials announced Tuesday.
The funds are targeted for release through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and will pay for continued development of a vaccine that uses the same mRNA technology that allowed rapid development and rollout of vaccines to protect against COVID-19. The award was made through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, a program that focuses on medical treatments for potential pandemics.
Moderna will launch trials to test the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine that could be used to scale up a response to a bird flu pandemic, if needed.
The H5N1 virus was detected earlier this year in dairy cows and has spread to more than 135 herds in 12 states and infected three people to date, all with mild cases. Federal health officials stress that the risk to the wider population remains low.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
With fresh COVID-19 cases bubbling up in some parts of the country, health officials are setting course for a fall vaccination campaign.
An influential government advisory panel on Thursday recommended new shots for all Americans this fall. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must endorse the recommendation.
Officials acknowledged the need for vaccinations is not as dire as it was only a few years ago. Most Americans have some degree of immunity from being infected, from past vaccinations or both. COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations last month were at about their lowest point since the pandemic first hit the United States in 2020.
But immunity wanes, new coronavirus variants keep emerging and there are still hundreds of COVID-19-associated deaths and thousands of hospitalizations reported each week.
What’s more, health officials have reported upticks this month in COVID-19-associated emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and a pronounced increase in positive test results in the southwestern U.S.
It’s not clear whether that’s a sign of a coming summer wave — which has happened before — or just a blip, said Lauren Ancel Meyers of the University of Texas, who leads a research team that tracks COVID-19.
“We’ll have to see what happens in the coming weeks,” she said.
At a Thursday meeting at the CDC in Atlanta, infectious disease experts voted to recommend updated COVID-19 vaccines for Americans age 6 months and older.
Health officials have told Americans to expect a yearly update to COVID-19 vaccines, just like they are recommended to get a new shot each fall to protect against the latest flu strains.
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration — following the guidance of its own panel of expert advisers — told vaccine manufacturers to target the JN.1 version of the virus. But a week later, the FDA told manufacturers that if they could still switch, a better target might be an offshoot subtype called KP.2.
On Thursday, the CDC advisory panel voted 11-0 for a new round of shots, which officials say should become available in August and September.
Many Americans aren’t heeding the CDC’s advice.
As of last month, less than one-quarter of U.S. adults and 14% of children were up to date in their COVID shots. Surveys show shrinking percentages of Americans think COVID-19 is a major health threat to the U.S. population, and indicate that fewer doctors are urging patients to get updated vaccines.
CDC officials on Thursday presented recent survey information in which about 23% of respondents said they would definitely get an updated COVID-19 shot this fall, but 33% said they definitely would not.
Meanwhile, the CDC’s Bridge Access Program — which has been paying for shots for uninsured U.S. adults — is expected to shut down in August because of discontinued funding. The program paid for nearly 1.5 million doses from September to last month.
“It is a challenge with this program going away,” said the CDC’s Shannon Stokley.
About 1.2 million U.S. COVID-associated deaths have been reported since early 2020, according to the CDC. The toll was most intense in the winter of 2020-2021, when weekly deaths surpassed 20,000. About 1 out of every 100 Americans ages 75 and older were hospitalized with COVID in the last four years, CDC officials said Thursday.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected two appeals related to COVID-19 vaccines from Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The justices did not comment in letting stand rulings against the group from the federal appeals courts in New Orleans and Philadelphia.
In a case from Texas, the group joined parents in objecting to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s authorization to administer coronavirus vaccines to children. In a case from New Jersey, Children’s Health Defense challenged a Rutgers University requirement, imposed in 2021, for most students to be vaccinated to attend courses on campus, though the school did not force faculty or staff to be vaccinated.
Children’s Health Defense has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
French President Emmanuel Macron is joining several African leaders on Thursday to kick off a planned $1 billion project to accelerate the rollout of vaccines in Africa, after the coronavirus pandemic exposed gaping inequalities in access to them.
The launch of the African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator, which will provide financial incentives to vaccine manufacturers, offered a momentary break for Macron from domestic political concerns as legislative elections loom on June 30 and July 7.
Many African leaders and advocacy groups say Africa was unfairly locked out of access to COVID-19 treatment tools, vaccines and testing equipment — that many richer countries bought up in huge quantities — after the pandemic swept the world starting in 2020.
WHO, advocacy groups and others want to help Africa get better prepared for the next pandemic, which many health experts say is inevitable. When the coronavirus pandemic began, South Africa was the only country in Africa with any ability to produce vaccines, officials say, and the continent produced a tiny fraction of all vaccines worldwide.
WHO failed in its efforts to help countries agree to a “pandemic treaty” — to improve preparedness and response to pandemics — before its annual meeting last month. The project was shelved largely over disagreements about sharing of information about pathogens that cause epidemics and the high-tech tools used to fight them.
Thursday’s event in Paris also aims to help give a funding shot-in-the-arm to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership that helps get needed vaccines to developing countries around the world.
Gavi says the project aims to make up to US$ 1 billion available over the next ten years help boost Africa’s manufacturing base, to improve global vaccines markets and improve preparedness and response to pandemics and outbreaks like HIV, malaria, TB and COVID-19.
The Geneva-based alliance says the accelerator will inject funds into manufacturers in Africa once they hit supply and regulatory milestones, with an aim to use market forces to drive down prices and encourage investment upstream.
Officials say the project will explore issues like technology transfer — which has been resisted by some Western countries with powerful pharmaceutical companies — as well as the possible creation of a African medicines agency and tackling regulatory hurdles faced in Africa’s patchwork of legal systems.
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AP journalist Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.
A Florida public school employee who faces firing because she allowed her transgender daughter to play girls high school volleyball assailed those who outed her child, saying Tuesday that the ensuing investigation destroyed the girl’s life.
Jessica Norton said her daughter was thriving at Monarch High School in suburban Fort Lauderdale before an anonymous tipster notified a Broward County school board member in November that the 16-year-old was playing on the girls varsity volleyball team in apparent violation of state law. The 2021 Fairness in Women’s Sports Act bars students who were born male from participating in girls sports.
That November tip launched a school district investigation that has led to Norton facing the possible loss of her job as a computer information specialist at Monarch because she allowed her daughter to play. Investigators also said she didn’t, as part of her job, change the child’s gender on school records back to “male” from “female,” as required by district policy.
Norton told the school board Tuesday that her daughter had been elected freshman and sophomore class president, was selected the student body’s director of philanthropy and was a homecoming princess. That all ended when the investigation began and the girl left Monarch.
“They destroyed her high school career and her lifelong memories,” Norton said. “I saw the light in my daughter’s eyes gleam with future plans of organizing and attending prom, participating in and leading senior class traditions, speaking at graduation and going off to college with the confidence and joy that any student like her would after a successful and encouraging high school experience. And 203 days ago, I watched as that life was extinguished.”
The girl now attends school online.
None of the board’s nine members responded to Norton, a seven-year district employee who received stellar evaluations before November.
Treatment of transgender children has been a hot-button issue across the country over the last few years. Florida is among at least 25 states that adopted bans on gender-affirming care for minors and one of at least 24 states that’s adopted a law banning transgender women and girls from certain women’s and girls sports.
The board had been scheduled to vote Tuesday on Superintendent Howard Hepburn’s recommendation that Norton be fired, but that decision has been delayed at least a month. A district committee recommended that Norton receive a 10-day suspension, but Hepburn overrode it. He has not said why. The board could fire Norton, suspend her or do nothing.
Broward is one of Florida’s most politically liberal counties, with twice as many Democrats as Republicans, and has a large LGBTQ+ community. The countywide school district is the nation’s fifth largest, with almost 255,000 students at 327 schools.
According to the district investigative report, board member Daniel Foganholi contacted the district’s police department after he received the tip. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Foganholi last year after the elected board member was found ineligible to serve.
Since 2021, DeSantis has signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and other measures targeting the transgender community. The Nortons are plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit trying to block the act.
Foganholi did not respond to emails last week and on Monday seeking comment.
Norton’s child began taking puberty blockers at age 11 and takes estrogen but has not had gender-affirming surgery. Such procedures are rarely done on minors.
Her parents say she often sat on the bench for Monarch’s volleyball team and has no athletic advantages from being born male. When investigators asked Cecil to describe the child, he said, “She looks like a girl to me. … she seems very small, very skinny.”
Responding to Foganholi’s complaint, Broward schools assigned two officers to investigate. The state education department also appointed an investigator.
They pulled school records for Norton’s daughter and locked them in a vault. They interviewed officials at Monarch and at the daughter’s middle and elementary schools, seeking to find out who knew the girl was transgender and when and how her records were changed. They also interviewed Norton and three Monarch volleyball players.
Norton, who has two older children, told them she enrolled her youngest child in kindergarten as a boy in 2013, four years before she began working for the district. The child transitioned to a girl in first grade. She said other parents and children knew, so it has never been a complete secret.
She said when her child was in second grade, she asked a school employee to change the child’s gender on her school records. She said then-Superintendent Robert Runcie told her that was the procedure. Runcie left the district in 2021 after an unrelated controversy and was not contacted.
But the district says such changes are only allowed if the parent first gets the child’s birth certificate amended. The birth certificate wasn’t amended until 2021 after Norton started working with the district. The district says after learning about its policy, Norton should have requested in 2017 that her child’s gender be changed back to male on her records.
Norton told investigators she didn’t because the amended records are accurate — her child is a girl.
Norton knew the new state law barred transgender girls from playing girls sports when her daughter entered high school in 2022. The detectives asked why she then let her daughter play volleyball and why she marked “female” on a permission form that asked the child’s “sex at birth.”
“Because she’s my child and she wanted to play,” Norton told them. Norton coached the junior varsity volleyball team.
When investigators interviewed the Monarch volleyball players, they said the team did not change clothes or shower together, so they were never disrobed with Norton’s daughter. All three said they knew or suspected Norton’s daughter is transgender, but it didn’t bother them that she was on the team. The Knights went 13-7 last season.
“I didn’t really have a problem with it because I didn’t think she was a threat or anything to anyone else,” one girl told investigators.
If you’ve been sick with COVID-19, you may have some protection against certain versions of the common cold.
A new study suggests previous COVID-19 infections lower the risk of getting colds caused by milder coronavirus cousins, which could provide a key to broader COVID-19 vaccines.
“We think there’s going to be a future outbreak of a coronavirus,” said Dr. Manish Sagar, senior author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine. “Vaccines potentially could be improved if we could replicate some of the immune responses that are provided by natural infection.”
The study looked at COVID-19 PCR tests from more than 4,900 people who sought medical care between November 2020 and October 2021. After controlling for things like age, gender and preexisting conditions, Sagar said he and his colleagues found people previously infected with COVID-19 had about a 50% lower chance of having a symptomatic coronavirus-caused common cold compared with people were were, at the time, fully vaccinated and hadn’t yet gotten COVID-19.
Several viruses cause colds; coronaviruses are thought to be responsible for about 1 in 5 colds.
Researchers linked the protection against coronavirus-caused colds to virus-killing cell responses for two specific viral proteins. These proteins aren’t used in most vaccines now, but researchers propose adding them in the future.
“Our studies would suggest that these may be novel strategies for better vaccines that not only tackle the current coronaviruses, but any potential future one that may emerge,” said Sagar of Boston Medical Center.
Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas who was not involved in the study, said the findings shouldn’t be seen as a knock against current vaccines, which target the “spike” protein studding the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
These vaccines, he said, are “still your best defense against severe COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death.”
But he added: “If we can find targets that cross-protect among multiple viruses, we can either add those to specific vaccines or start to use those as vaccine targets that would give us broader-based immunity from a single vaccination. And that would be really cool.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
