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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s top health department official are directly contradicting federal health recommendations and warning residents against getting a new COVID-19 booster, saying there’s not enough evidence it provides benefits that outweigh risks. DeSantis, who is running for president, and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo discussed the vaccine with doctors Wednesday on a Zoom call livestreamed on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. It repeated much of what they said a week ago during a live event in Jacksonville, in which they warned against the vaccine that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended this week. (9/13)

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ hand-picked surgeon general on Wednesday warned healthy adults under the age of 65 against taking a new Covid-19 booster, contradicting the Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, speaking during a roundtable that DeSantis hosted, said that after three years of Covid, most healthy people don’t need to worry about getting infected from a virus that has killed more than 1 million people across the country. Ladapo is a well-known vaccine skeptic who has claimed some shots pose risks to healthy young men. (Sarkissian, 9/13)

As Americans fend off a late summer COVID-19 spike and prepare for a fresh vaccine rollout, Republicans are raising familiar fears that government-issued lockdowns and mask mandates are next. It’s been a favorite topic among some of the GOP’s top presidential contenders. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters that people are “lurching toward” COVID-19 restrictions and “there needs to be pushback.” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott posted online that the “radical Left” seeks to bring back school closures and mandates. And former President Donald Trump urged congressional Republicans to stop the Biden administration from bringing back COVID-19 “mandates, lockdowns or restrictions of any kind.” (Swenson, 9/13)

Approximately 5,000 cases of rabies in animals are reported in the United States annually .... This disease continues to pose a risk to the health of animals and their human contacts. That’s why we were dismayed to see a recent national survey conducted by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health and published in the journal Vaccine that suggested the existence of a surprising degree of vaccine hesitancy in dog owner populations. Over half of the surveyed pet owners displayed some level of hesitancy to vaccinate their dogs, including vaccines against rabies. (Mani and Weese, 9/13)

The latest, updated COVID-19 vaccines should soon be available to everyone and offered largely free of cost, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Benadjaoud and Haslett, 9/13)

Updated coronavirus vaccines are on the way — the latest weapon for fending off a wily foe that has relentlessly evolved and is causing an uptick in covid-19 cases and hospitalizations. The shots, designed to provide improved protection against omicron subvariants now circulating, are manufactured by Moderna and by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech. They were cleared Monday by the Food and Drug Administration and were recommended Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its advisers. (McGinley and Sun, 9/13)

The PBS NewsHour spoke with Dr. Payal Patel, an infectious disease physician at Intermountain Health in Utah, about what to know about the latest vaccine. (Santhanam and Kuhn, 9/13)

Mount Sinai has received a $13 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to develop vaccines that can protect against many different types of coronaviruses. The 5-year grant was awarded to the Icahn School of Medicine. The award will fund the "Programming Long-lasting Immunity to Coronaviruses" (PLUTO) project led by Viviana Simon, MD, PhD of Mount Sinai, and Ali Ellebedy, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis. (Soucheray, 9/13)

Moderna said Wednesday that its experimental mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine generated a stronger immune response against four strains of the flu virus than a currently marketed vaccine in a Phase 3 study, paving the way for the company to discuss a path to approval with regulators. The experimental shot, dubbed mRNA-1010, was compared with a currently approved seasonal flu vaccine from GSK called Fluarix. The results are from an interim analysis and were disclosed in a company news release Wednesday morning. (Tirrell, 9/13)

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said Wednesday that new positive data on the company’s influenza vaccine, and an aggressive plan to launch 15 products over the next five years, shows that his company will no longer be defined by the Covid-19 vaccines that made it a household name. “This is not a Covid vaccine company,” Bancel told Barron’s on Wednesday, as the company prepared to unveil a new five-year plan at a presentation on the company’s research pipeline. “This is a true platform company with an incredible probability of technical success versus pharma.” (Nathan-Kazis, 9/14)