(NEW YORK) — The most restrictive abortion law in the nation took effect in Texas early Wednesday, effectively barring the procedure across the state, as the U.S. Supreme Court remained silent on an emergency request from women’s health groups to block the measure while legal challenges continue.
Texas becomes the first and only state in the country to outlaw abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. Twelve other states have passed similar laws that have not yet taken effect due to legal challenges.
Abortion providers across Texas had said the measure would “immediately and catastrophically” prevent care for “at least 85%” of Texas abortion patients. Several clinics reported full waiting rooms up until the midnight deadline.
“Our clinic staff saw patients until 11:56 last night, just 3 minutes before the 6 week abortion ban went into effect in Texas,” Whole Women’s Health, a top abortion provider in Texas, posted to Twitter.
Most of the abortions performed nationwide are after 6 weeks of pregnancy; staff at several Texas clinics have said they plan to start turning away patients Wednesday.
“Our clinics are providing abortions in accordance with the law,” the group added Wednesday. “Our work is not over.”
The law, Senate Bill 8, says “a physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion … if the physician detects a fetal hearbeat,” including embryonic cardiac activity, that can be observed as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.
In an unusual twist, the law expressly prohibits the state from enforcing the ban, instead authorizing private citizens to bring civil suits against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion — but not the patient herself.
“It actively encourages private individuals to act as bounty hunters by awarding them at least $10,000 if they are successful,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.
The enforcement mechanism has complicated the legal dispute before the Supreme Court, because it is not clear who might bring a lawsuit and how widespread private legal action might be.
The abortion providers “have not shown they’ll be harmed by a bill that may never be enforced against them by anyone, much less the government,” a group of Texas state officials defending the law wrote in a filing with the Supreme Court late Tuesday.
The court has only been asked at this stage to decide whether or not to issue a temporary injunction on S.B. 8 while lower-level court proceedings continue. Whatever the decision, legal experts cautioned that it will not have direct bearing on the precedent in Roe v Wade or abortion rights more broadly across the country.
The justices are likely to weigh in on the matter but do not operate on a fixed timeline.
“The abortion industry is using their last, desperate option in an attempt to block the life-saving Texas Heartbeat Act,” said John Seago, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion rights group.
“This anti-Life lawsuit is invalid. We are hopeful that Justice Alito will examine the compelling arguments raised explaining why the case should be ultimately dismissed,” he said.
Women’s rights groups planned protests against S.B. 8 across Texas on Wednesday afternoon. Meanwhile, advocates said women seeking abortion services now faced expensive and time-consuming options to obtain care.
“Patients will have to travel out of state – in the middle of a pandemic – to receive constitutionally guaranteed healthcare,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is leading the challenges to Texas’ law. “And many will not have the means to do so. It’s cruel, unconscionable, and unlawful.”
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. is poised to begin rolling out booster shots in a matter of weeks, with still one major sticking point to resolve: It’s not entirely clear yet that third shots are needed.
President Joe Biden recently vowed to begin deploying boosters the week of Sept. 20, pending a green light from federal regulators.
But health experts advising the government on that decision say the August announcement by Biden’s political appointees came as somewhat of a surprise. It also was unclear, they said, why that date was chosen at all.
Evidence for boosters is still mixed, and announcing a timetable — while likely popular with much of the public — put independent government regulators in a corner by suggesting they would sign off no matter what.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t get out (of the decision), but I think the public expectation is that boosters are needed now,” said Dr. Henry Bernstein, a pediatrician at Northwell Health Cohen’s Children Medical Center in New York who has advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines.
“There’s a lot more data to be reviewed and work to be done in evaluating whether boosters are needed in various populations,” Bernstein added.
The question of whether America’s immunity is waning has become an urgent question in recent months with the rise of the delta variant and large pockets of the country still unvaccinated.
The latest analysis, released Monday by the CDC, found troubling signals on the ability of vaccines to prevent infections and to keep older people out of the hospital.
Whereas the vaccines were 90% effective in June at preventing hospitalization in people ages 75-plus, that number fell to around 80% in July.
But even with such a drop, the data still suggests extraordinary protection against becoming seriously ill with COVID-19. It also raises more questions than it answers: Is immunity waning with time? Is the delta variant making people sicker? Is this a problem mostly for older Americans, whose immune systems are less robust to begin with?
Young adults under age 49 are still 24 times more likely to end up hospitalized if unvaccinated. And the vast majority of people in the hospital are unvaccinated, suggesting the vaccines are holding up in real world scenarios.
“We don’t have a lot of evidence of reduced vaccine effectiveness against important outcomes in most of the population based on our current data,” said Dr. Beth Bell, a professor at the University of Washington and independent adviser to the CDC who will help decide whether to recommend boosters to Americans.
Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, who works with the CDC advisory panel on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was among those who said the Sept. 20 date was a surprise and that it’s unclear why it was chosen.
During a meeting of CDC advisers, Maldonado said she was fielding text messages from colleagues asking: “Why are we rolling out detailed plans for this when it sounds like we still don’t know?”
Typically, the Food and Drug Administration reviews data before announcing any decision on whether a vaccine can be administered. Then a CDC advisory group of experts weighs in, and the CDC director signs off on whether to recommend the vaccine to the public.
In this case, Biden’s political appointees involved in the pandemic response — including acting FDA chief, Dr. Janet Woodcock — agreed on the Sept. 20 date before that process played out. And with the crisis in Afghanistan still unfolding, the president switched gears to the pandemic, publicly unveiling his commitment to every American getting a booster shot eight months after their immunization.
Pfizer and BioNTech, which partnered to develop the nation’s first vaccine, have said they have early data suggesting that a booster dose anywhere from six to 12 months after the initial vaccination will help maintain a high level of protection. That data has not yet been shared publicly.
“The frustration too comes in part due to the sense of urgency here as well, because of the public pressure to get the booster. Everyone would like data that are still evolving,” Maldonado said.
On Tuesday, the FDA confirmed two longtime vaccine officials were planning to depart the agency. Their exit, addressed in a memo to staff, followed news reports citing the officials’ frustration with the process. Woodcock told colleagues she was confident in the leadership of the FDA’s vaccine chief Peter Marks, who planned to remain in his position.
“We have put together a plan that will allow us to continue prioritizing science, while meeting timelines that are important to ensuring the end of this devastating pandemic,” she wrote in the staff email.
Other top political appointees also defended the Sept. 20 date on Tuesday. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House press briefing that there was international data that will be presented and likely play a role in the regulatory decision on boosters.
Jeff Zients, Biden’s COVID coordinator, noted that the FDA and CDC had signed on to the plan for a Sept. 20 rollout.
“The bottom line, this virus has proven to be unpredictable, and we want to stay ahead of it, and plan for every scenario, and that’s been our approach from day one and will continue to be our approach,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — Thousands of Americans were finally persuaded to get their first shot in the week following the Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer-BioNtech coronavirus vaccine, new data reveals.
A new ABC News analysis found that initial data, stemming from the last seven days, indicates that since the FDA’s announcement of the approval, the U.S. has indeed seen a slight uptick in the average number of Americans getting their first COVID-19 vaccine dose.
Just prior to the announcement, the U.S. rate of first doses had stagnated. Although the country experienced an increase in people initiating vaccination in July as new coronavirus cases surged across the country, the average number of Americans getting their first dose had then declined.
However, following Pfizer’s full approval, the U.S. saw a 17% increase in the number of Americans getting vaccinated with their first dose.
In the week prior to the full approval, an average of about 404,000 Americans were initiating vaccination each day. As of Monday, approximately 473,000 Americans were getting their first shot each day.
“As expected, full approval was enough to convince at least some to finally get immunized,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor.
Although there does not appear to have been a mad rush of people getting vaccinated in the days immediately following approval, the uptick was significant enough to shift the country’s vaccination trend upward.
“While surveys initially had estimated a far greater segment of the population who pegged full approval as their reason for holding off, we have yet to see a large wave of newly convinced people to roll up their sleeves,” Brownstein added.
Experts caution that although the uptick is encouraging, there is still much work to do in convincing millions more hesitant Americans to get the shot.
However, according to a newly released Axios-Ipsos poll, vaccine hesitancy among Americans has hit a record low, with only 2 in 10 Americans saying they are unlikely to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and 14% saying they are not likely at all.
The poll, which was conducted prior to full FDA approval, found that about a third of unvaccinated Americans said they would be likely to get vaccinated if it was formally approved for use by the FDA. However, about 6 in 10 said they would still not get vaccinated even if it were approved by the FDA.
In another move that officials hope will encourage Americans to get the shot, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention independent advisory panel, took the approval a step further on Monday, unanimously endorsing Pfizer’s vaccine for use in people 16 years of age and older
“We now have a fully approved COVID-19 vaccine and ACIP has added its recommendation. If you have been waiting for this approval before getting the vaccine, now is the time to get vaccinated and join the more than 173 million Americans who are already fully vaccinated,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement Monday.
It is difficult to know for sure if this increasing trend will continue. On Tuesday, for example, the U.S. reported a single-day total of approximately 283,000 first shots administered, well below the current seven-day average.
Vaccination trends also remain unsteady, and highly susceptible to mandates imposed by jurisdiction.
“While FDA approval has many positive implications for the vaccine rollout, this is not a replacement for the constant need for basic education on the individual and community benefits of immunization,” Brownstein said.
Full approval has rendered it easier for employers to mandate vaccines, which could also be one of the drivers of rising vaccination rates, experts have suggested. In the last week alone, an increasing number of companies and government entities have moved to require proof of vaccination or risk termination.
Just hours after the full approval was announced, for example, the Pentagon announced that they would begin preparations to make the vaccine mandatory.
“I’m calling on more companies in the private sector to step up with vaccine requirements that will reach millions more people,” President Joe Biden said in remarks at the White House last week. “If you’re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full FDA approval to require vaccinations, I call on you now to do that — require it. It only makes sense to require a vaccine to stop the spread of COVID-19.”
The push for more companies to require employees to get vaccinated comes as the U.S. continues to struggle through its latest surge in COVID-19 infections.
With more than 101,000 patients now hospitalized across the country with COVID-19, the U.S. is steadily approaching its hospitalization peak from early January, when more than 125,000 patients were hospitalized at one time. A little over two months ago, there were under 12,000 patients receiving care.
And nationally, nearly 94% of U.S. counties are now reporting high community transmission.
“With only 53% of the population fully vaccinated, we are going to need a much more significant increase in vaccinations if we are going to limit the impact of a fall surge and get to the other side of this pandemic,” Brownstein said.
(NEW YORK) — In yet another setback in the decadeslong scientific quest for an HIV vaccine, a Johnson & Johnson HIV vaccine candidate failed to reduce the risk of infection in a clinical trial among women in southern Africa. The would-be vaccine uses the same underlying technology used successfully for COVID-19 and Ebola viruses, but this recent high-profile failure is another example of immense challenge of creating a vaccine against HIV.
The trial, called Imbokodo, was co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. It included more than 2,600 women living in five African countries where women and girls have a high risk of HIV infection.
The vaccine was safe, researchers said, but ultimately, efficacy was only 25% — meaning people who received the vaccine had a slightly smaller risk of developing HIV, but the difference was so slight that the result might be chalked up to random chance.
Prominent scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, have been searching for an effective HIV vaccine since the virus, which attacks the immune system and leads to a disease called AIDS if left untreated, was first identified in the 1980s. Today, nearly 38 million people are living with HIV worldwide. Although effective treatments can now help people infected with HIV live long and healthy lives, there is still no vaccine that can prevent infection.
Still, scientists say they aren’t giving up.
“The development of a safe and effective vaccine to prevent HIV infection has proven to be a formidable scientific challenge,” Fauci said in prepared remarks. “Although this is certainly not the study outcome for which we had hoped, we must apply the knowledge learned from the Imbokodo trial and continue our efforts to find a vaccine that will be protective against HIV.”
“The challenges associated with the development of an HIV vaccine are unprecedented in the history of vaccinology. After 40 years of global efforts, we still do not have an HIV vaccine,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
“This trial was not a home run but hopefully will guide the HIV field moving forward,” said Barouch, whose laboratory contributed significantly to the initial development of the investigational vaccine.
Despite the setback, the Imbokodo trial showed the vaccine was safe among people who received it — a hopeful sign. Imbokodo means “rock” in the South African language isiZulu, referring to a proverb about women’s strength and community.
“We are extremely grateful to the women who volunteered for the Imbokodo study, and to our partners, including the people on the front lines, all of whom are contributing every day to this enduring quest to make HIV history.” Dr. Paul Stoffels, vice chairman of the executive committee and chief scientific officer at Johnson & Johnson, said in prepared remarks.
The Johnson & Johnson HIV vaccine uses the same underlying “viral vector” technology used in its current COVID-19 vaccine. Scientists say the recent failure has no bearing on the technology itself, which has been used successfully for other viruses, including Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Rather, HIV itself is a unique virus. It evades the body’s immune system, making it very difficult to create a vaccine that generates immunity against infection.
HIV activists and scientists alike say this result shouldn’t slow down other efforts to find an effective HIV vaccine.
“It is very disappointing that this particular vaccine candidate did not work in this trial, but the trial was well-conducted and got an answer quickly. HIV remains a global threat, and a safe, efficacious and accessible HIV vaccine is still needed to contribute towards curbing new infections and providing a durable end to the pandemic,” Mitchell Warren, executive director of HIV prevention advocacy organization AVAC, said in prepared remarks.
Another late-stage trial called Mosaico, which uses a slightly different vaccine approach and is being tested among men who have sex with men and transgender people in Europe and North America, will continue. Another study called PrEPVacc is combining HIV vaccine candidates with a once-daily pill called PrEP, which reduces the risk of HIV infection. Meanwhile, Moderna has said it will begin early-stage clinical trials of its own HIV vaccine candidate, which uses its mRNA technology, this year.
“This is in no way the end of the search for an HIV vaccine,” Warren said.
(NEW YORK) — From popular sayings like mommy juice, wine down, rose all day and happy hour to T-shirts that read “Mama needs wine,” the marketing of alcohol towards women in America is omnipresent.
And while women have historically consumed less alcohol than men, that trend is changing, increasingly to the detriment of women’s health, data shows.
The increases in alcohol consumption, binge drinking, and alcohol-related health issues are largely driven by women in their 30s and 40s. Over the past 20 years, as alcohol consumption among women has increased, the rates of death involving alcohol increased 85% among women, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA).
And this spring, amid the coronavirus pandemic, doctors across the country warned of anecdotal evidence showing increases in the number of hospitalizations and deaths caused by alcohol-related liver disease over the past year, particularly among young women.
Women have increased their consumption of alcohol during the coronavirus pandemic, data shows.
The increase in drinking among women comes as research shows that even one alcoholic drink per day can contribute to an increased risk of breast cancer for women. Women are also, research shows, at greater risk than men for health risks like alcohol-related cardiovascular diseases, liver disease and alcohol use disorder.
While the impacts of marketing and societal pressures have combined to make alcohol a common topic among women, talking honestly about how much they may be drinking and how it is affecting their bodies is still taboo, according to Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News chief medical correspondent and a board-certified OBGYN.
“This is something that is really, really ripe with questions, emotions, myths, misconceptions, and unfortunately, stigma and taboo,” said Ashton. “There is a taboo about alcohol for women that is oftentimes not spoken about at all, or if it is spoken about, it’s whispered about.”
“Alcohol is, in fact, a type of drug, and yet, it is socially acceptable in our country, in our society, in our culture,” she added. “That can set up a potentially precarious situation, or relationship, for anyone.”
Here are six things women should know and talk about with their friends when it comes to alcohol, according to Ashton.
1. Serving size matters.
For women, a moderate alcohol intake per week is defined as seven servings of alcohol or less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
One serving of alcohol is defined as five ounces for wine and just one-and-a-half ounces for hard alcohol, far less than what is typically served in bars, restaurants and at home.
“You can do this experiment for yourself at home with water or wine, but let’s start with water,” explained Ashton. “You can take water, pour it into your wine glass to the amount that you think that you would serve yourself.”
“If you were having a glass of rose, for example, and then pour that water into a measuring cup, chances are it is going to be significantly more than five ounces. It might even be twice that amount,” she said. “So what you think is one drink, i.e., one serving, could actually be one-and-a-half or even two servings.”
Ashton continued, “It doesn’t matter whether it is one [alcoholic drink] a day or all on the weekends or spread out over a couple of days. If you’re drinking let’s say a margarita that’s made with three ounces of tequila, because it’s served in a giant, supersize, pretty glass, your seven drinks might actually be 21 drinks, 21 servings, and that qualifies as heavy alcohol consumption for a woman.”
For women, even eight or more drinks qualify as heavy alcohol consumption.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism shares this graphic on how much alcohol a drink contains.
Ashton said that participating in Dry January — not consuming any alcohol for the month of January — for several years herself has taught her to keep a “mental tally” of the servings of alcohol she has per week.
“Now I kind of keep a mental tally of my servings per week so that I’m under that seven number that’s recommended, or acceptable, in the medical literature for alcohol consumption for women,” she said. “I just am aware of it very much like I would be aware of spending habits or my cardio exercise.”
2. Drinking alcohol can cause cancer.
Drinking alcohol is listed by the Department of Health and Human Services as a known human carcinogen.
“That means it’s known to be a contributing agent in the formation or development of various types of cancers,” said Ashton, noting that those cancers include cancer of the esophagus, liver cancer, colon cancer and breast cancer.
Women who consume about one alcoholic drink per day have a 5 to 9% higher chance of developing breast cancer than women who do not drink at all, and that risk increases for every additional drink a woman has per day, according to NIAAA.
3. Alcohol affects women differently than men.
Men can drink double the servings of alcohol each week and still stay within the moderate alcohol intake limits because their bodies metabolize alcohol differently than women, according to Ashton.
“Generally, women are smaller, the body fat distribution in a woman is different and their metabolism is different,” Ashton said. “So in general, two drinks for a woman could give you the blood alcohol level equivalent of one drink for a man.”
“That’s [why] it’s important to take a gender-specific approach to this issue and not lump men and women together,” she said.
4. The health effects of alcohol are worse than a hangover.
While women may talk or joke about the hangovers they have after drinking too much alcohol, what often goes unsaid, or even unknown, is what alcohol is doing inside their bodies.
“When you look at the possible effects of excessive alcohol consumption or heavy alcohol consumption for women, it ranges from head to toe,” said Ashton, citing health consequences including brain atrophy, cognitive issues, weight gain, negative effects on the heart and cardiovascular system, increased risk of alcoholic liver disease and fatty liver, increased risk of cancers and increased risks of accidents based on alcohol intoxication.
And just as women metabolize alcohol differently than men, they also face more serious health consequences, research shows.
Women are more susceptible to alcohol-related heart disease than men; alcohol misuse produces brain damage more quickly in women than in men; women may be more susceptible than men to alcohol-related blackouts, or gaps in memory; and women who regularly misuse alcohol are more likely than men who drink the same amount to develop alcoholic hepatitis, a potentially deadly condition, according to the NIAAA.
“We have to remember that almost anything, if done to excess, has the potential to be bad for us,” said Ashton.
5. Not all women may safely consume alcohol.
For women especially, there are times in their lives when it is not medically safe to consume alcohol.
Women who should completely avoid alcohol are those who are under age 21, the legal drinking age, those who are pregnant and those taking medications that can interact negatively with alcohol.
When it comes to pregnancy, research has proven that any amount of alcohol intake at any point in pregnancy can be harmful, according to the CDC. Still, CDC data shows that as many as one in nine women report drinking while pregnant.
Doctors advise against drinking while pregnant because alcohol in the mom’s blood passes through the umbilical cord to the baby and can cause everything from miscarriage and stillbirth and can increase the risk of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders which can cause physical, cognitive, and behavioral problems in children, according to the CDC.
Drinking during pregnancy is also associated with an increased risk of premature, or early, birth.
6. There are flags women can look for to know when drinking is too much.
“At this point, it’s pretty well known that it was a strategic marketing campaign on the part of the alcohol industry to target women, in particular moms, to make alcohol consumption cooler, more hip, more current,” said Ashton. “In terms of the medical, physical, psychological and societal implications of that, I think it’s really up to women that we have to be able to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, ‘Why am I reaching for this glass? Why am I reaching for this drink?'”
As a physician, Ashton said a red flag for her would be if a woman is answering that question all the time, “I feel so tense. I feel so stressed. I need it to help calm me down.”
Another “glaring red flag” for Ashton is if women find themselves drinking alone, looking to drink in more covert or hidden or cryptic environments or in situations where they’re hiding it from people.
For both of those red flag cases, Ashton suggests seeking medical help.
A “pink flag” for Ashton as a physician is if a woman answered the question of why she reached for an alcoholic drink by saying, “‘Because I feel like I deserve it. Because it’s been a tough year-and-a-half. Because it’s just the low-hanging fruit for me, and it’s better than doing something else.”
“That may be a time to say, ‘Is there something else going on emotionally, psychologically, in your environment, behaviorally, that could be targeted so that there are less potentially negative behaviors involved,” she said.
The good news for women is that help is available, and it starts by talking about their drinking, be it with a doctor, with a friend, with a loved one or with a mental health professional, according to Ashton.
“I can’t encourage women enough to speak up and seek help,” she said. “It takes massive courage. It can be incredibly scary. But the health consequences will sneak up on someone who is consuming too much alcohol.”
Describing the dangers of waiting too long to get help for drinking, Ashton continued, “Ultimately, it’s like a marble rolling off the edge of a table. Once it gets to that edge, it’s much harder to stop it.”
If you or someone close to you needs help for a substance use disorder, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or visit FindTreatment.gov, SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator.
(WASHINGTON) — The United States is facing a COVID-19 surge this summer as the more contagious delta variant spreads. More than 637,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 4.5 million people have died from the disease worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Just 61.2% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Latest headlines:
Here’s how the news is developing today. All times Eastern.
Aug 30, 11:48 am
Vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization drops, CDC says
The COVID-19 vaccines’ ability to keep people out of the hospital appears to be dropping slightly, particularly for those 75 and older, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Monday during an advisory panel.
The CDC has previously estimated that 97% of people in the hospital being treated for COVID-19 are unvaccinated, but that data was collected before the spread of delta, a hyper-transmissible variant that many doctors have warned appears to be making people sicker.
The latest CDC analysis estimates that the ability of the COVID vaccines to keep a person out of the hospital is now between 75% to 95%.
For people older than 75 in particular, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization experienced the steepest decline, from more than 90% to 80% between June and July.
Health experts are also concerned that a person’s immunity could be waning over time, particularly among older people whose bodies are less likely than younger people to develop a strong immune response to the vaccines.
However, the vaccine still remains highly effective at preventing serious illness, according to the briefing.
(NEW YORK) — As many parents wait for COVID-19 vaccines to be authorized for children younger than 12, doctors increasingly are alarmed at the rising number of kids who are missing routine vaccinations — a trend that’s had a domino effect from last year, when so many families were confined to their homes.
Now, a new analysis finds that to catch up, community health centers may need to increase the number of childhood vaccinations by 265% — and maintain that pace for at least six months.
“The decline in routine pediatric immunizations is very concerning because measles, pertussis and chickenpox still remain threats to child health,” said Dr. Josh Sharfstein, a pediatrician and vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
With in-person schooling restarting this fall, a growing chorus of doctors is now urging parents to make sure their children receive their routine pediatric vaccinations, which run along a specific schedule. For example, babies are supposed to get their measles, mumps, rubella vaccination near their first birthday. By age 11, it’s time to be vaccinated against human papilloma virus.
But with so many children missing these routine immunizations, doctors are now warning of a potentially sharp uptick in vaccine-preventable diseases, which may coincide with a potentially difficult flu season if children also are receiving fewer flu shots.
“We now face the double challenge of keeping children safe from the delta variant and making sure they’re not falling ill from other preventable diseases as they return to in-person schooling,” Sharfstein said. “The next year will be an immense challenge for parents, pediatricians, teachers and school administrators to protect children.”
HealthEfficient, a not-for-profit organization in New York that supports community health centers nationwide, has been tracking childhood immunization rates since the beginning of the pandemic.
“Our data shows a substantial and persistent drop in the number of childhood immunizations occurring over the last two years,” Alan Mitchell, the group’s executive director, told ABC News. “The numbers in 2021 are in some cases even lower than 2020, and 2020 already represented a large drop-off from 2019.”
Analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of high-performing immunization information systems from 10 jurisdictions in the U.S. showed that administered doses of routine childhood and adolescent vaccines were substantially lower from March to May 2020 compared with that same time period in 2018 and 2019.
A study conducted by a team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington found a similar drop-off in vaccination rates throughout the world, with the most significant decrease seen in April 2020. Data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF shows that at least 23 million children missed routine vaccinations in 2020 because of the disruption in health services.
“Any time there is a decrease in vaccination rates, this lowers herd immunity and increases the potential for an outbreak, as we saw for measles in Minnesota in 2017 and in New York in 2018-2019,” said Dr. Keila Lopez, an associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine/ Texas Children’s Hospital.
“These declining immunization rates risk reversing years of gains via public health efforts to improve pediatric immunization trends,” Mitchell said. “In our view, a sustained, coordinated public health initiative is needed to drive these rates back up to pre-pandemic levels.”
Experts recommend restoring vaccination services and campaigns, helping health care workers and community leaders educate the public about the importance of vaccinations, identifying and rectifying vaccination gaps in individual communities, making sure COVID-19 vaccinations don’t affect the routine childhood vaccination drive, and implementing plans to prevent and respond to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.
The impact of the pandemic can be felt as a ripple through other serious conditions that make catching up even more critical.
Health care providers and schools should assess the vaccination status of all pediatric patients, including adolescents, and contact those who are behind schedule to ensure all children are fully vaccinated, experts told ABC News. Furthermore, more public health campaigns to combat misinformation and reinforce the overwhelming value of vaccines also could help, and community health centers have a critical role to play.
“Based on the current delta surge impacting higher numbers of children, school reopening’s with varied public health practices and more frequent quarantines,” Lopez said, “I fear that routine and flu vaccine acquisition will fall even lower this season.”
Tushar Garg, M.D., an incoming postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit. Jay Bhatt, D.O., an internist and adjunct faculty at the UIC School of Public Health, is an ABC News contributor.
(WASHINGTON) — Public health officials are sticking with the recommendation that people get booster shots eight months after getting the COVID-19 vaccine, but that could change based on reviewing the data, Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday.
“We’re still sticking with the eight months,” the chief medical adviser for the White House told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “However, as we’ve said, even in the original statement that came out, we’re gonna have to go through the standard way of the (Food and Drug Administration) looking at the data and then the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. So although we’re sticking with eight, we’re remaining flexible, that if the data tells us differently, we’ll make adjustments accordingly. But for now, we’re sticking with the eight.”
As the U.S. prepares a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot program, President Joe Biden said on Friday that the administration is considering whether booster shots should be given as early as five months after vaccination. Biden was meeting with the Israeli prime minister and credited his advice that the U.S. should start earlier.
The new daily COVID-19 case average in the U.S. has risen to 142,000, and is 130,000 daily cases higher than the average was about two months ago, as of Thursday. The U.S. has also continued to experience its steepest rise in COVID-19 related hospitalizations since the winter of 2020, with more than 101,000 patients hospitalized across the country with COVID-19. This marked the highest number of patients hospitalized with the virus in seven months.
Pediatric hospital admissions for children under 18 with COVID-19 were also up by 514% since July Fourth, as of Friday.
Regarding when children under 12 will be eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Fauci said that the FDA should be examining the data toward the middle or end of September.
“Hopefully we’ll be acting quickly, depending on the data, and their assessment of the risk-benefit ratio,” Fauci said.
But the nation’s top infectious disease doctor also emphasized that there are other ways to protect unvaccinated children as they head back to school amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, fueled by the delta variant of the virus.
“You can protect children who can’t get vaccinated because of their age. Yes, we can protect them by surrounding them with a community of people who are vaccinated. That’s how you protect children. And you also do it by complying with the CDC guidance about masking, particularly masking in school, even though you have vaccinated teachers and vaccinated personnel. You want to give that extra, added level of protection for the children.”
Fauci also addressed an unclassified report released on Friday by the intelligence community that did not come to any definitive conclusion over the origins of the coronavirus first detected in Wuhan, China. The agencies that worked on the report wrote that two hypotheses are still possible: “natural exposure to an infected animal” or “a laboratory-associated incident.”
When asked if the origins will ever be known, Fauci said, “You know, I hope so … because it will help us to avoid this in the future. But we will need the cooperation of Chinese scientists and Chinese public health officials, if we’re gonna do the proper surveillance serologically of people who were infected in China, as well as the animals; being able to asses whether or not animals had viruses that are closely related to SARS-COV-2. We’ll need to do that in China with the cooperation of the Chinese,” Fauci said.
ABC News’ Arielle Mitropoulos contributed to this report.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — A new, peer reviewed study estimates that the delta variant of COVID-19 doubles the risk of being hospitalized compared to the prior alpha variant among unvaccinated people.
The delta variant is the most highly transmissible strain seen yet, first emerging in India in late 2020 and quickly sweeping the globe. But scientists have debated whether this variant is also deadlier.
Preliminary studies from Scotland and Canada hinted that this version of the virus might be making people sicker, but some researchers said this could also be explained by the variant’s hyper-transmissibility, which leads to massive COVID surges that overwhelm hospitals.
This new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, adds increased evidence that the delta variant is more likely to send people to the hospital than the previously dominant alpha variant.
This doesn’t apply if you’re vaccinated, researchers say. Vaccines dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death for both the alpha and delta variants. Most of the people in the U.K. study were unvaccinated.
“Our analysis highlights that in the absence of vaccination, any Delta outbreaks will impose a greater burden on healthcare than an Alpha epidemic,” said Dr. Anne Presanis, one of the study’s lead authors and senior statistician, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, in prepared remarks.
In one of the largest studies yet looking at this question, U.K. researchers analyzed medical records of more than 40,000 COVID cases from March to May, roughly 20% of which were delta variant infections. By measuring what happened to people within 14 days of testing positive, researchers found that people infected with delta were more likely to seek medical care at a hospital or emergency room compared to people infected with the alpha variant.
“This is a large study that suggests a slight increase in [emergency department] visits and hospitalizations among unvaccinated persons infected with delta versus alpha,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine and Grady Health System in Atlanta.
“But to me, what the paper says more about delta is the fact that vaccines work,” Del Rio said.
In the United States, the delta variant was first identified in March and had become the dominant variant by July. It has led to a massive surge among mostly unvaccinated people, including many young adults and children, who are less likely to be vaccinated than older adults.
“I know from anecdotal reports here in the U.S. that we are seeing more serious infections with the delta variant than the alpha variant, and these data support that,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“I think this is a trend we are seeing in the U.S. where pediatric ICUs are filling up and we are seeing young adults requiring intubation at a much higher rate than with the alpha peak in early 2021,” Durbin said. “I am confident that we are seeing more severe illness in younger people with the delta variant.”
In early August, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said there wasn’t enough data yet to be confident that the delta variant is more serious for children, but preliminary evidence so far is “tipping in that direction.”
The Pfizer vaccine is currently authorized for children ages 12 and older, with authorization for children 5 to 11 expected sometime this winter. Roughly half of children ages 12 to 17 have received their first shot, according to White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, speaking at Friday press briefing.
-ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. intelligence agencies remain “divided on the most likely origins of COVID-19,” after President Joe Biden’s 90-day push for his intel community to “redouble their efforts” to find a more definitive conclusion regarding the source of the virus.
In a declassified summary released late Friday afternoon, the agencies said that two hypotheses for the virus’ origin remain possible: either natural exposure to an infected animal, or an accidental lab leak.
Four elements of the U.S. intelligence community said with “low confidence” that COVID-19 was initially spread from an animal to a human, while one element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was the result of a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and pointing to the “inherently risky nature of work on Coronaviruses.”
The agencies, however, generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon, and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.
Barring new information, said the report, a more definitive explanation will not be possible without Beijing’s cooperation.
Biden, responding to the report, said that efforts to identify the cause of the virus will continue.
“While this review has concluded, our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest,” Biden said. “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again.”
Referring to China, the president said, “Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world. Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”
But international scientists tasked with studying the virus’ origins warned Wednesday that a crucial window is “closing fast”: the shrinking opportunity for any thorough scientific study to be completed. As time wears on, potential evidence wanes, and tracing back biologic breadcrumbs will yield diminishing returns, said more than ten of the authors of a World Health Organization-led report that is urging action to “fast-track the follow-up scientific work required” for better answers by the WHO.
Assessing the intelligence and raw data available this spring, it became apparent to Biden and his top officials that a large cache of information had yet to be fully analyzed, officials told ABC News — including potential evidence that could hold clues to the virus that has now claimed more than four million lives worldwide.
Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has been that the pandemic originated in one of two ways: The virus emerged from human contact with an infected animal, or from a laboratory accident.
But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.
Following Biden’s call for clarity in May, intelligence agencies have spent the last three months poring over an untapped trove of information, and have amassed classified records and communications, genomic fingerprints of the virus, and early signals as to where and when the virus may have flared up first.
Biden’s August deadline marks zero hour for the next phase of a larger international quest: to trace back the virus in order to hold the responsible parties to account, and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next one.
Any emerging answers, however, come amid a roiling geopolitical debate, as COVID-19’s origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home — while abroad, the Chinese government vehemently denies the virus could have come from one of its labs.
“What the U.S. cares about is not facts and truth, but how to consume and malign China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday ahead of the U.S. report, claiming that China had welcomed collaborative research which “laid the foundation for the next-phase global origins tracing work.”
The Chinese government rejected the World Health Organization’s proposed audits of Wuhan’s labs in July, part of the UN agency’s recommended phase two study — saying they could not accept needless “repetitive research” when “clear conclusions” had already been reached.
But there have been no definitive conclusions as to where COVID-19 came from. The joint WHO-led team presented a range of options in their March report, calling a lab leak “extremely unlikely,” but offering pathways for further investigation. Team members have voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government — echoed in international criticism that politics had stymied science.
Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was “premature” and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies. China’s subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has underscored that the U.S. will continue the “diplomatic spadework” of rallying support for the WHO-led study — while warning that the administration will not accept Beijing’s stonewalling.
“Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where [COVID-19] came from, or they will face isolation in the international community,” Sullivan told Fox News in June.
A group of bipartisan lawmakers urged Biden not to let this month’s deadline hamstring a thorough investigation.
“If the 90-day effort you have announced does not yield conclusions in which the United States has a high degree of confidence, we urge you to direct the intelligence community to continue prioritizing this inquiry until such conclusions are possible,” Sens. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a late July letter to the president.
Asked about the report’s release, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it would take “several days” for an unclassified and collated version to come together, but that agencies were working “expeditiously to prepare that.”
With no definitive proof of the virus’ origin, scientists and policymakers alike have been left to speculate. Some of the first COVID-19 clusters occurred around Wuhan’s wet markets, where exotic wild fare was sold in close quarters, offering ample opportunity for the virus to jump from animals to humans, as in past epidemics.
No direct animal host for COVID-19 has been identified, and if there is one, it could take years to find, experts say. While environmental samples from the Wuhan markets tested positive, animal samples that were tested did not. Transmission earlier on and within the wider community would suggest the market was not the original source of the pandemic, experts say.
In late summer and early autumn of 2019, satellite imagery shared exclusively with ABC showed dramatic spikes in auto traffic around major Wuhan hospitals — suggesting the virus may have been spreading long before the world was alerted. U.S. intelligence officials had already been warning that a contagion was sweeping through the region as far back as late November 2019, changing patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the populations, according to sources briefed on the matter.
Proponents of the lab-leak theory point to gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a controversial study that amplifies a virus’ potency to understand how to neutralize it better. They also point to concerns over biosafety at the WIV’s facilities, where researchers had worked with bat coronavirus samples 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 — as well as workers at the lab who were hospitalized with “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in November 2019.
Advocates of zoonotic origin, however, emphasize that the 4% discrepancy means a world of genetic difference — and WIV lead researcher Shi Zhengli insists that she tested all her workers for COVID-19 antibodies, and all tests came back negative.
Despite pressure to approach the “high degree of confidence” desired by the public and requested in the lawmakers’ July letter, such certainty remains elusive — something presaged by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in an interview with Yahoo News earlier this summer.
“We’re hoping to find a smoking gun,” Haines said. “It’s challenging to do that.”
-ABC News’ Josh Margolin, Karson Yiu, James Gordon Meek, Eric M. Strauss, Ben Gittleson and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
