Health & Fitness

The makers of COVID-19 vaccines are figuring out how to tweak their recipes against worrisome virus mutations — and regulators are looking to flu as a blueprint if and when the shots need an update.

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care facilities are receiving a one-time supplemental allocation of 200,000 Moderna COVID-19 vaccine doses this week from the Department of Health and Human Services.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the most daunting question facing the child welfare field was whether a precipitous drop in calls to child abuse hotlines across the country was masking an epidemic of abuse. With schools shut down and families under a lockdown, the fear was that child abuse cases might skyrocket.

Congressman Raul Ruiz, M.D. (CA-36) is urging retail pharmacies to join the fight for health equity in COVID-19 vaccinations. In a letter to the CVS Health CEO Larry Merlo, Dr. Ruiz called on the retail pharmacy to prioritize high-risk, underserved communities in its vaccine administration plans.

The U.S. has entered a tricky phase of the COVID-19 vaccination effort as providers try to ramp up the number of people getting first shots while also ensuring a growing number of others get second doses just when millions more Americans are becoming eligible to receive vaccines.

Evidence is mounting that having COVID-19 may not protect against getting infected again with some of the new variants. People also can get second infections with earlier versions of the coronavirus if they mounted a weak defense the first time, new research suggests.

The drive to vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus is gaining speed and newly recorded cases have fallen to their lowest level in three months, but authorities worry that raucous Super Bowl celebrations could fuel new outbreaks.

The CDC issued a report last week on the demographics of those who received at least one shot during the first month of the vaccination campaign. Some groups were vaccinated at rates that matched their share of priority populations such as health care workers and nursing homes. But there was a glaring outlier in that Black adults made up only 5.4% of those vaccinated, about one-third of their numbers in those first-tier groups. State data show a similar pattern, reports AP.

Despite its world-class medical system and its vaunted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fell behind in the race to detect dangerous coronavirus mutations. And it's only now beginning to catch up.

Coronavirus infections and hospitalizations in California are plummeting weeks after it appeared some hospitals were so overwhelmed they might have to start rationing care, and the state's top health official said Tuesday if the trends continue by early March the number of hospital patients will fall by half.