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The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved updated Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, putting the new shots on track to reach most Americans in the coming days amid a summer surge of the virus. The jabs target a strain called KP.2, a descendant of the highly contagious omicron subvariant JN.1 that began circulating widely in the U.S. earlier this year. (Constantino, 8/22)

In recent weeks, people have been hospitalized with Covid at a rate nearly twice as high as during the same time last summer. By late July, Covid was killing roughly 600 Americans each week, a substantial drop from this winter but double the number from this spring. The availability of boosters has not translated into actual vaccinations. By spring, only one in five adults had received last year’s updated Covid vaccine. Even older Americans, who are at far greater risk of being severely sickened, largely spurned the shots, with only 40 percent of people 75 and older taking last year’s vaccine. (Mueller and Weiland, 8/22)

AstraZeneca has warned it could relocate its vaccine manufacturing site from the UK to the United States as talks with the new Labour government over plans to cut state aid have become deadlocked, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. (8/23)

After a yearslong lull thanks to Covid-19 precautions like isolation and distancing, whooping cough cases are now climbing back to levels seen before the pandemic, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far this year, there have been 10,865 cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, nationwide. That’s more than triple the number of cases documented by this time last year, and is also higher than what was seen at this time in 2019. Doctors say these estimates are most likely an undercount, as many people may not realize they have whooping cough and therefore are never tested. (Blum, 8/22)

t first glance, it looks like an unassuming farm. Cows are scattered across fenced-in fields. A milking barn sits in the distance with a tractor parked alongside. But the people who work there are not farmers, and other buildings look more like what you’d find at a modern university than in a cow pasture. Welcome to the National Animal Disease Center, a government research facility in Iowa where 43 scientists work with pigs, cows and other animals, pushing to solve the bird flu outbreak currently spreading through U.S. animals — and develop ways to stop it. (Conlon and Stobbe, 8/23)