�鶹Ů��

Nearly half of all adults in the United States plan to get the newly recommended COVID-19 vaccine, according to results from a survey released Wednesday. The latest poll conducted by the �鶹Ů�� COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor found that 23% of U.S. adults say they will "definitely" get the updated booster, 23% say they will "probably" get it, while 19% say they will "probably not" get it and 33% say they will "definitely not" get it. (Wetsman and Winsor, 9/27)

When broken down across political parties, 69 percent of Democrats said they planned to get vaccinated against COVID this season, while only 25 percent of Republicans said the same. Among independents, 45 percent said they would get “definitely” or “probably” get the updated COVID-19 dose. Split across age groups, the percentage of people who said they would get the vaccine grew as among older age groups, with roughly two out of three people over the age of 65 indicating they planned to get immunized. The majority of parents with children across all age groups said they did not plan to get their children the updated COVID-19 vaccine. (Choi, 9/27)

People are becoming more concerned about COVID-19 amid the recent uptick in cases and new variants, according to Gallup’s latest quarterly poll. Gallup polled more than 5,000 U.S. adults between Aug. 29 and Sept. 5. Thirty percent of respondents said they believe the pandemic is getting worse — up from 5% in late May/early June and 8% in February, according to a news release on Gallup’s website. (Rudy, 9/27)

For the first time, the federal government isn't picking up the tab. Private insurers are supposed to make the vaccine free of charge, but there have been glitches. (Martin and Noguchi, 9/27)

Two years ago, the L.A. Unified School District set a high bar for COVID safety, telling employees: Get vaccinated or lose your job. That vaccine mandate — which achieved a 99% compliance rate among teachers — ended Tuesday following a 6-1 vote by the Board of Education. The nation’s second-largest school system — widely viewed as a national pacesetter in strong COVID-19 safety measures early in the pandemic emergency — had been among the last public school systems to continue a mandate. (Blume, 9/27)

Pfizer Inc's (PFE.N) chief executive said on Tuesday that almost 250,000 courses of the drugmaker's oral antiviral COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid were being administered per week as cases surged in the United States. Speaking at the Cantor Fitzgerald Annual Healthcare Conference, Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said the company is still uncertain about when Paxlovid, which is currently being distributed by the government, will receive approval to be sold in the U.S. commercial market. (9/27)

Millions of Americans report having long COVID, either previously or at the time of being surveyed, according to new data from the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. In reports published Tuesday using data from 2022 National Health Interview Survey, the agency said 6.9% of U.S. adults reported ever having long COVID, while 3.4% said they currently had the condition at the time of interview. Based on U.S. Census data, that would mean nearly 18 million have suffered from the condition at some point since the pandemic began. (Moniuszko, 9/26)

Of all the classic Covid symptoms (the dry cough, the stinging throat, the achiness), fatigue may be one of the most debilitating, persistent and confounding. Dr. Marc Sala, co-director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Covid-19 Center, said fatigue has become the dominant complaint from his patients. That could be because Covid symptoms are becoming milder overall — he no longer regularly sees patients with severe respiratory damage, and so fatigue has come to the forefront, he said. It’s also possible that fatigue could be a more common symptom with the newer variants, he said. (Blum, 9/27)

But three years later, the pandemic’s trajectory is becoming more difficult to predict – and decision-makers are increasingly reliant on the warnings of a diverse bunch of independent researchers. This week, Ryan Hisner, a teacher from Indiana, US, was listed alongside various academic co-authors on a paper in Nature, describing how the antiviral drug molnupiravir used to treat patients with Covid-19 may be fuelling the evolution of new variants by creating a specific set of mutations. (Geddes, 9/27)

It sounds like something Elon Musk might have cooked up: “Disease X.” In fact, the term was coined years ago as a way of getting scientists to work on medical countermeasures for unknown infectious threats — novel coronaviruses like the one that causes Covid-19, for example — instead of just known ones, like the Ebola virus. The idea was to encourage the development of platform technologies, including vaccines, drug therapies and diagnostic tests, that could be rapidly adapted and deployed in response to an array of future outbreaks with epidemic or pandemic potential. (Gale, 9/27)