Monthly Archives: September 2021

Leng Vong Reiff had just received her second dose of a Covid vaccine and thought guiltily of her two young, unvaccinated sons. So she began banging away at her keyboard.

Like countless parents across the nation, she was searching for vaccine clinical trials for children. She managed to find one, applied and got a call back.

They said that a clinic in Nebraska had an opening right now, four hours away, she recalled. Better yet, this was a placebo-free trial, so she knew her sons would be given the bona fide vaccine.

A resident of Clive, Iowa, Ms. Vong Reiff bundled Logan, 9, and Quentin, 5, into her car and raced west on Interstate 80 to the clinic, where her sons received their first shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. They returned three weeks later for their second shots, protecting them for the school year ahead. And they will go back in December for antibody testing.

Families are confronting difficult situations, now that most schools have reopened after as many as 13 months of remote teaching. As the highly contagious Delta variant has taken hold, dozens of schools around the country have closed classrooms or paused sessions, especially in states with low vaccination rates.

Forty-eight million children in the United States are under 12 and not eligible yet for a vaccine endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration.

And about 252,000 children, including teenagers, tested positive in early September, the largest number of such cases since the start of the pandemic, according to an American Academy of Pediatrics analysis.

Of those 12 through 17 who are eligible to get a Covid shot, roughly 54 percent have received at least one dose. But public health experts say it will be months before the F.D.A. decides whether the results of various clinical trials for those who are 5 to 11 and 2 to 5 merit authorizing the shots for the youngest age groups.

With few options other than taking precautions like mask-wearing, some parents have even sought, through their pediatricians, off-label shots that are adult doses, a practice the F.D.A. discouraged on Friday. The agency warned that children are not small adults, and that the adult doses now in wide use have not been fully studied for potential safety risks in younger children.

Theres no question that this summer has been particularly trying for parents, especially after public health experts warned that the Delta variant was highly transmissible even from vaccinated household members. Although children still are less likely than adults, especially older adults, to be hospitalized or die from Covid, nearly 30,000 children were admitted to hospitals with Covid in August, the highest levels to date during the pandemic.

The hospitalization rate in mid-August for children and adolescents with confirmed Covid was nearly five times the rate in late June, according to a study released earlier this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That rate climbed nearly tenfold among children newborn to 4 years old, the report found.

Covid-related emergency room visits and hospital admissions also increased among children in mid-August, according to a second C.D.C. study.

Geography played a role, the researchers found. Those visits and admissions occurred 3.4 and 3.7 times more in the states with lower vaccination rates.

Parental anxiety has fueled the demand for slots in childrens vaccine trials and made appointments scarce. Pfizer, for instance, is fully booked in its clinical trial, a spokeswoman said.

So Ms. Vong Reiff most likely nabbed a cancellation slot in Nebraska.

Dr. Tina Sosa, a mother of two, did not have to travel far to get her son vaccinated in a trial. A pediatric hospitalist, Dr. Sosa was on a fellowship at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center when Pfizer began a trial there.

Her older son, Brandon, 3, had no side effects from the two shots he received in April, she said. I even squeezed his arm and asked did it hurt, and he said no.

Dr. Sosa has since moved to Rochester, N.Y., where she works at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Her 7-month-old son, Leo, is to begin a Moderna trial next month, while Brandon will follow up on his trial in Cincinnati via an app and telephone, Dr. Sosa said.

Sept. 11, 2021, 5:33 p.m. ET

In his push for vaccine mandates on Thursday, President Biden expressed the need to develop vaccines to protect children younger than 12.

Now if youre a parent of a young child and youre wondering when will it be, when will it be the vaccine available for them, I strongly support independent scientific review for vaccine uses for children under 12, he said. We cant take shortcuts of that scientific work.

The three major U.S. drug companies making vaccines are at different stages when it comes to childrens trials.

Pfizer is now conducting a single trial for children under 12, Kit Longley, a spokeswoman, said.

The trial has included 4,500 children in its first phase: 3,000 who are 5 to 11; 750 who are 2 to 5; and 750 who are 6 months to 2 years. Its second and third phases include 4,500 children.

The company anticipates having its trial data for children ages 5 to 11 later this month, and after more review, potentially will request F.D.A. emergency use authorization for that age group, Ms. Longley said Friday.

Moderna announced on Thursday that the company had finished its enrollment of children ages 6 to 11, totaling 4,000 children, for its trial. The company said it expected to file for F.D.A. emergency-use authorization for that age group by the end of this year.

Another application should be filed in early 2022, the company said, based on the results of a trial for children 5 and younger. In all, Moderna expected to enroll about 12,000 children, Colleen Hussey, a company spokeswoman, said.

Johnson & Johnson has started its Phase 3 clinical trial in adolescents from 12 to 17, and will submit the findings to regulators when finished, according to a company spokesman, Jake Sargent.

The company is also planning several other studies, he said. One will include children from 6 to 11, followed by children 2 to 5. Another will look at those younger than 2.

Impatient parents who are seeking off-label adult shots for their children concern officials like Dr. Sean OLeary, vice chairman of the committee on infectious diseases at the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Its a bit of the Wild West out there, said Dr. OLeary, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Childrens Hospital Colorado.

UnderstandVaccine and Mask Mandates in the U.S.

Jennifer Macklom of Cedar Park, Texas, was determined to get her three daughters enrolled in a trial. Haunting her were the memories of 2016, when her daughter Miriam had grown sick with an adenovirus at age 2 . Simultaneously, her daughter Naomi, who was only 6 weeks old at the time, contracted a form of the coronavirus that pre-dated Covid.

Miriam was taken by ambulance to the Dell Childrens Medical Center in Austin. Naomi was admitted through its emergency room.

Both girls were hooked up on oxygen and feeding tubes at the same time, Ms. Macklom recalled.

I said, I cant do that again. I cant emotionally have anyone I love or even know be hooked up to one of these things, said Ms. Macklom, a high school mathematics teacher.

So, with the advent of the pandemic, she conferred with her pediatrician, and all three children landed on a waiting list for a vaccine trial. Miriam is now 8, Naomi, 5, and Ruth, 2.

Five months passed. Then the phone rang, and Ms. Macklom learned that her daughters were at the top of the list to receive the Pfizer vaccine at a branch of Austin Regional Clinic, in central Texas.

So many parents were interested in that trial for the under-12 age group that the staff had no need to recruit them, according to Heidi Shalev, a clinic spokeswoman.

Ruth was too young for vaccinations at that site. Now, to avoid the risk of contracting the virus at day care, she is spending weekdays with Ms. Mackloms parents.

Miriam and Naomi got their two shots. They dont know if they contained the vaccine, since this trial called for one-third of shots to be a placebo. The children had to wait for an hour after the injections, and the staff gave them a coloring book and rice crispy treats.

The girls will learn in early winter if they got the vaccine or the placebo. If it is the placebo, they will receive shots of the real stuff.

Getting in the study was so life-changing, Ms. Macklom said. We actually went out camping.

Ms. Vong Reiff, who owns her own marketing firm, also decided to enroll her sons in the trial to protect her husband, who underwent surgery and radiation for nonmalignant meningioma, she said.

In mid-August, the entire family headed to Maine, to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and then to Boston for a duck boat tour.

Had the boys not been vaccinated, we wouldnt have gone, Ms. Vong Reiff said. For us, it was a kind of celebration to be vaccinated, slowly getting back to who we were.

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Parents Find Ways to Get Their Youngest Children Covid Vaccines - The New York Times

The new coronavirus variant called Mu has been found to be circulating in forty-nine states, with only Nebraska not to have a single case.

Both U.S. health officials and the World Health Organization are closely monitoring the fast-spreading variant that was first identified in Colombia, which seemingly has the potential to evade immunity provided by a previous infection or vaccination and could be more transmissible than the Delta variant that has become the dominant strain here in the United States.

Also known by medical experts as B.1.621, the Mu variant was recently added to the WHOs list of variants of interest.

This variant has a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape, the WHO wrote in its Covid-19epidemiological report, adding that Mu already has been seen in roughly forty countries.

Preliminary data presented to the Virus Evolution Working Group show a reduction in neutralization capacity of convalescent and vaccine sera similar to that seen for the Beta variant, but this needs to be confirmed by further studies, it added.

In all, the WHO has confirmed that it is currently monitoring four variants of concern, including Delta, which was first detected in India last fall; Alpha, first detected in the United Kingdom; Beta, first detected in South Africa; and Gamma, first detected in Brazil.

California Sees Rising Cases

With nearly four hundred cases due to the new variant, California has been the hardest hit of all the states.

The identification of variants like Mu, and the spreading of variants across the globe, highlights the need for L.A. County residents to continue to take measures to protect themselves and others, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of L.A. County Public Health, said in a statement.

This is what makes getting vaccinated and layering protections so important. These are actions that break the chain of transmission and limits Covid-19 proliferation that allows for the virus to mutate into something that could be more dangerous, she added.

Constantly Mutating

Only a few weeks ago, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that an even more severe variant could emerge relatively soon.

If we dont crush the outbreak to the point of getting the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated, then what will happen is the virus will continue to smolder through the fall into the winter, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases noted in an interview with McClatchy.

Were very fortunate that thats the case. There could be a variant thats lingering out there that can push aside Delta. If another one comes along that has an equally high capability of transmitting but also is much more severe, then we could really be in trouble, he continued.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.

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Coronavirus Variant Mu Now Detected in Nearly Every State - The National Interest

(THE CONVERSATION) The rise of coronavirus variants has highlighted the huge influence evolutionary biology has on daily life. But how mutations, random chance and natural selection produce variants is a complicated process, and there has been a lot of confusion about how and why new variants emerge.

Until recently, the most famous example of rapid evolution was thestory of the peppered moth. In the mid-1800s, factories in Manchester, England, began covering the moths habitat in soot, and the moths normal white coloring made them visible to predators. But some moths had a mutation that made them darker. Since they were better camouflaged in their new world, they could evade predators and reproduce more than their white counterparts.

We are anevolutionary biologistand aninfectious disease epidemiologistat the University of Pittsburgh who work together to track and control the evolution of pathogens. Over the past year and half, weve been closely following how the coronavirus has acquired different mutations around the world.

Its natural to wonder if highly effective COVID-19 vaccines are leading to the emergence of variants that evade the vaccine like dark peppered moths evaded birds that hunted them. But with just under40% of people in the world having received a dose of a vaccine only 2% in low-income countries andnearly a million new infections occurring globally every day, the emergence of new, more contagious variants, like delta, is being driven by uncontrolled transmission, not vaccines.

How a virus mutates

For any organism, including a virus, copying its genetic code is the essence of reproduction but this process is often imperfect. Coronaviruses use RNA for their genetic information, and copying RNAis more error-prone than using DNA. Researchers have shown that when the coronavirus replicates,around 3% of new virus copies have a new, random error, otherwise known as a mutation.

Each infection producesmillions of viruseswithin a persons body, leading to many mutated coronaviruses. However, the number of mutated viruses is dwarfed by the much larger number of viruses that are the same as the strain that started the infection.

Nearly all of the mutations that occur are harmless glitchesthat dont change how the virus works and others in fact harm the virus. Some small fraction of changes may make the virus more infectious, but these mutants must also be lucky. To give rise to a new variant, it must successfully jump to a new person and replicate many copies.

Transmission is the important bottleneck

Most viruses in an infected person are genetically identical to the strain that started the infection. It ismuch more likely that one of these copies not a rare mutation gets passed on to someone else. Research has shown thatalmost no mutated viruses are transmittedfrom their original host to another person.

And even if a new mutant causes an infection, the mutant viruses are usually outnumbered by non-mutant viruses in the new host andarent usually transmitted to the next person.

The small odds of a mutant being transmitted is called the population bottleneck. The fact that it is only a small number of the viruses that start the next infection is the critical, random factor that limits the probability that new variants will arise. The birth of every new variant is a chance event involving a copying error and an unlikely transmission event. Out of the millions of coronavirus copies in an infected person, the odds are remote that a fitter mutant is among the few that spread to another person and become amplified into a new variant.

How do new variants emerge?

Unfortunately, uncontrolled spread of a virus can overcome even the tightest bottlenecks. While most mutations have no effect on the virus,some can and have increased how contagious the coronavirus is. If a fast-spreading strain is able to cause a large number of COVID-19 cases somewhere, it will start to out-compete less contagious strains and generate a new variant just like the delta variant did.

Many researchers are studying which mutations lead to more transmissible versions of the coronavirus. It turns out that variantshave tended to have many of the same mutationsthatincrease the amount of virus an infected person produces. With more than a million new infections occurring every day and billions of people still unvaccinated, susceptible hosts are rarely in short supply. So, natural selection will favor mutations that can exploit all these unvaccinated people and make the coronavirus more transmissible.

Under these circumstances, the best way to constrain the evolution of the coronavirus is to reduce the number of infections.

Vaccines stop new variants

The delta variant has spread around the globe, and thenext variants are already on the rise. If the goal is to limit infections, vaccines are the answer.

Even though vaccinated people can still get infected with the delta variant,they tend to experience shorter, milder infectionsthan unvaccinated individuals. This greatly reduces the chances of any mutated virus either one that makes the virus more transmissible or one that could allow it to get past immunity from vaccines from jumping from one person to another.

Eventually, when nearly everyone has some immunity to the coronavirus from vaccination, viruses that break through this immunity could gain a competitive advantage over other strains. It is theoretically possible that in this situation, natural selection will lead to variants that can infect and cause serious disease in vaccinated people.

However, these mutants must still escape the population bottleneck. It is unlikely that vaccine-induced immunity will be the major player in variant emergence as long as there are lots of new infections occurring. Its simply a numbers game, and for now, the modest benefit the virus would get from vaccine evasion isdwarfed by the vast opportunities to infect unvaccinated people.

The world has already witnessed the relationship between the number of infections and the rise of mutants. The coronavirus remained essentially unchanged for months until the pandemic got out of control. With relatively few infections, the genetic code had limited opportunities to mutate. But as infection clusters exploded, the virus rolled the dice millions of times and some mutations produced fitter mutants.

The best way to stop new variants is to stop their spread, and the answer to that is vaccination.

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Massive numbers of new COVID19 infections, not vaccines, are the main driver of new coronavirus variants - KRQE News 13

More than 79% of Illinois adults have received at least one vaccine dose and more than 62% are fully vaccinated

SPRINGFIELD The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) today reported 26,062 new confirmed and probable cases of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Illinois, including 197 additional deaths since reporting last Friday, September 3, 2021. More than 79% of Illinois adults have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose and more than 62% of Illinois adults are fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of Illinois total population, more than 66% has received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose and more than 51% of Illinois total population is fully vaccinated.

Currently, IDPH is reporting a total of 1,564,386 cases, including 24,261 deaths, in 102 counties in Illinois. The age of cases ranges from younger than one to older than 100 years. Since reporting on Friday, September 3, 2021, laboratories have reported 578,943 specimens for a total of 29,756,833. As of last night, 2,346 individuals in Illinois were reported to be in the hospital with COVID-19. Of those, 549 patients were in the ICU and 311 patients with COVID-19 were on ventilators.

The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from September 3-9, 2021 is 4.5%. The preliminary seven-day statewide test positivity from September 3-9, 2021 is 5.1%.

A total of 14,149,453 vaccines have been administered in Illinois as of last midnight. The seven-day rolling average of vaccines administered daily is 20,514 doses. Since reporting on Friday, September 3, 2021, 143,596 doses were reported administered in Illinois.

*All data are provisional and will change. Additional information and COVID-19 data can be found at http://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid19.

Vaccination is the key to ending this pandemic. To find a COVID-19 vaccination location near you, go to http://www.vaccines.gov.

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Public Health Officials Announce 26,062 New Cases of Coronavirus Disease Over the Past Week | IDPH - IDPH