Pfizer’s new Paxlovid tablets are shown here at La Clinica Fruitvale Village in Oakland, Calif. on March 3, 2022. COVID-19 antiviral pills Paxlovid and molnupiravir are becoming increasingly available now that supply has vastly improved since the rollout began in January.
The vaccination rates among children under 5 remains stagnant in the U.S., according to the CDC, even as coronavirus-related hospitalizations among kids in that age group rises. One million people globally have died from COVID-19 in 2022, officials from the World Health Organization said. With the possibility of resurging infections this fall, should you get a booster now or wait for new shots tailored to fight omicron variants? Moderna sued Pfizer, claiming the drugmaker copied key technology to make its COVID-19 vaccine.
Bob Wachter, UCSF’s chair of medicine, says he plans to continue masking, likening people who are in a rush to return to normal and remove their face coverings while in public to reckless drivers. Though COVID-19 trends continue to improve around the Bay Area, the coronavirus community transmission level across the region remains “high,” according to data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Growing peer pressure to go maskless in indoor spaces,” Wachter tweeted on Friday. “I deal with it by likening it to driving on a speed-trap stretch of road & having a car zoom up behind me. While speeding is that driver’s prerogative (& risk), I know my best move is to let them pass, not speeding up myself.”
His latest message was better received than a recent tweet quoting Dr. Leana Wen, a divisive pandemic commentator who has frequently spoken out against virus mitigation measures, noting her children would not mask this year at school. “A legitimately tough call — if I had school kids, I’d keep masks on until case rates were lower, but Dr. Leana Wen’s reasoning is sound & I totally respect this call,” Wachter said on Twitter. “I agree there are no wrong decisions on masking now — it’s about how one weights risks, incl. some uncertain ones.” Many of his followers took issue with the line “no wrong decisions” coming from a public health expert. “This isn’t just a person talking about their private choices,” responded Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at UC Hastings. “This is a public figure who has been actively campaigning against school masking using a national newspaper to continue making it hard for schools to require masking and shame parents who mask. It’s not reasonable.”
Google employees are questioning the company’s return-to-office mandates after a sharp increase coronavirus exposure notifications, according to CNBC, which spoke to several employees for its report. Since they were required to return to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April, several staffers have dissented, pointing out that Google enjoyed its fastest revenue growth in 15 years while most were working remote work. Some employees told the outlet that they have received a steady stream of COVID-19 notifications about the company’s Mountain View headquarters and San Francisco offices, in addition to previously announced outbreaks at its Los Angeles-based campuses. Another anonymous group of workers, meanwhile, is pushing for the company to drop its vaccine policy so they can return to in-person work — using the frequent exposure notices to justify their argument that the life-saving vaccines are not effective.
School-aged children can successfully use a nasal swab to obtain their own COVID-19 test specimen with appropriate instructions, according to a new report published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The government agency hopes the results of the study, conducted by researchers at Emory University School of Medicine and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, have an immediate impact on ramping up coronavirus testing in schools. “Having adults collect swab samples from kids is not a trivial matter in schools and other group settings,” said Bruce Tromberg, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, in a statement. “The study data may surprise some and will reassure others that children as young as 4 years old can follow simply presented instructions and collect their own nasal specimen for COVID-19 testing.” The study, conducted in July and August 2021 using nearly 200 children with symptoms of COVID-19, found that when shown a 90-second instructional video, the self-collected swabs and those collected by a health care worker matched 97.8% of the time for a positive result and 98.1% of the time for a negative result.
The newer BA.4.6 omicron subvariant is gaining ground on the dominant BA.5 strain of the virus, according to data published Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. BA.5 made up about 89% of the sequenced coronavirus cases in the United States last week, while BA.4.6’s proportion increased to 7.5%. Both sublineages are crowding out BA.4, which appeared in 3.6% of sequenced cases. The U.S. is averaging about 90,625 new confirmed COVID-19 cases per day, up slightly from an average of 88,000 reported last Friday.
The seven-day average for new coronavirus infections in the Bay Area fell below 20 new infections per 100,000 residents for the first time since April on Friday, according to state data analyzed by The Chronicle. The region is averaging 19 daily cases per 100,000, while California’s seven-day average held at 24 daily cases per 100,000 residents. The statewide test positive rate has also plateaued at 10%. Confirmed COVID-19 deaths continue to increase, with the state now averaging 49 per day, including 16 in the Bay Area. That is up from 44 and 7, respectively, one month ago. There are 3,144 individuals hospitalized with the virus in California, including 582 in the Bay Area.
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday announced the removal of N95 respirators from the agency’s medical device shortage list, signaling that demand or projected demand for this type of face protection device commonly used in health care settings no longer exceeds the supply. The FDA attributed the change to increased domestic manufacturing and updates to supply chain assessment. “Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the FDA’s top priorities has been to ensure frontline health care workers have access to the critical protections they need,” said Suzanne Schwartz, a director with the agency. “We have worked very closely with our partners at NIOSH, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and with U.S. manufacturers to stabilize, rebuild and secure health care access to high-quality, single-use respirators, including those that are American-made. Today, our national capacity for production of these devices is stronger and our supply chain is more resilient because of these collective efforts on behalf of the dedicated people working to save lives.”
The U.S. Secret Service said Friday that it has recovered $286 million in fraudulently obtained pandemic loans and is returning the money to the Small Business Administration. The Secret Service said an investigation initiated by its Orlando office found that alleged conspirators submitted Economic Injury Disaster Loan applications by using fake or stolen employment and personal information and used an online bank, Green Dot, to conceal and move their criminal proceeds. The agency worked with Green Dot to identify roughly 15,000 accounts and seize $286 million connected to the accounts, the Associated Press reports. “This forfeiture effort and those to come are a direct and necessary response to the unprecedented size and scope of pandemic relief fraud,” said Kevin Chambers, director for COVID-19 fraud enforcement at the Justice Department.
Moderna said Friday that it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pfizer and BionTech, claiming they copied key features of its mRNA technology that was in development long before the COVID-19 pandemic. “We believe that Pfizer and BioNTech unlawfully copied Moderna’s inventions, and they have continued to use them without permission,” said Moderna Chief Legal Officer Shannon Thyme Klinger in a statement. The suit does not seek to remove the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine from the market nor to enjoin future sales. Moderna had previously promised not to enforce its patents related to COVID vaccines as long as the pandemic lasted, but more recently signaled that the policy might not extend to manufacturing in wealthier countries, the New York Times reports.
One million people have died from COVID-19 in 2022, officials from the World Health Organization said on Thursday, marking yet another “tragic milestone” in the pandemic. The agency has recorded about 6.45 million deaths since the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, China in late 2019. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, said the latest figure is especially disheartening because there are life-saving measures such as vaccination, masking and ventilation available now. “This week, we crossed the tragic milestone of one million reported deaths so far this year,” he said at a press briefing. “We cannot say we are learning to live with COVID-19 when one million people have died with COVID-19 this year alone, when we are two-and-a-half years into the pandemic and have all the tools necessary to prevent these deaths.”
The U.S. has administered 14,559 of its 626,900 available doses of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine since the shots were cleared for use in mid-July, according to data published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that use an mRNA-based approach to developing immunity, the Novavax vaccine uses traditional protein-based technology, which federal health officials hoped would make it more palatable to some vaccine holdouts. The fourth vaccine option was initially offered to adults 18 and older as a primary dose and, last week, authorized for children 12-17. So far, only 2,591 individuals have completed their primary vaccination series using the Novavax shots.
Vaccination uptake among children under 5 remains stagnant in the U.S., with just 3.4% of those under 2 and 5.7% of those between the ages 2 to 4 having received at least one dose since the shots became available to the youngest group in June, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But COVID-19-related hospitalizations in children 4 and under have sharply increased since the spring, rising from 20 children hospitalized in April to 100 in the first week of August, and 80 last week, federal data show. By comparison, 44 children between the ages of 5 to 17 were hospitalized with the virus last week. Vaccine coverage is 37.8% for 5 to 11 year olds, and 70.5% for 12 to 17 year olds. The health agency is urging families to get their children vaccinated. “Parents and caregivers should get children ages 6 months and older vaccinated for the best protection against severe illness from COVID-19,” the CDC tweeted Thursday.
Nearly one half of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 during the period when the BA.2 omicron subvariant was dominant in the U.S. had received a primary vaccination series and at least one booster or additional dose, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From the end of March through May, COVID-related hospitalization rates increased among all adults — with a higher proportion of those hospitalized aged 65 years or older compared to during the delta and BA.1 periods in 2021 and early 2022.
During the BA.2 period, 27.8% of hospitalized adults were unvaccinated, representing a 60% decrease from 69.4% during the delta period and a 41% decrease from 47.2% during the BA.1 period, highlighting that many more people had received their shots. The vaccines did mitigate the severity of the illness, with the proportion of in-hospital deaths during these periods declining from 12.4% (delta) to 7.5% (BA.1) and 5.1% (BA.2). “This finding indicates that in addition to increasing vaccination coverage and encouraging all adults to stay up to date with vaccinations, other multiple nonpharmaceutical and medical prevention measures should be implemented to protect persons at high risk for severe illness and hospitalization because of older age, disability, moderate or severe immunocompromise, or other underlying medical conditions,” the health agency said in its report.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill appears to provide little or no benefit for younger adults, while still reducing the risk of hospitalization and death for high-risk seniors, according to a large study published Wednesday. The results from a 109,000-patient Israeli study showed that Paxlovid cut hospitalizations among people 65 and older by roughly 75% when given shortly after infection. That’s consistent with earlier results used to authorize the drug in the U.S. and other nations. But people between the ages of 40 and 65 saw no measurable benefit, according to the analysis of medical records. “Paxlovid will remain important for people at the highest risk of severe COVID-19, such as seniors and those with compromised immune systems,” said Dr. David Boulware, a University of Minnesota researcher and physician, who was not involved in the study. “But for the vast majority of Americans who are now eligible, this really doesn’t have a lot of benefit.” A spokesman for Pfizer declined to comment on the results, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Aidin Vaziri is a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle.
Dominic Fracassa is an assistant metro editor overseeing breaking news and criminal justice in San Francisco. He previously covered San Francisco City Hall as a staff writer.