Tag: vaccine

Sometimes when she’s feeding her infant daughter, Amanda Harrison is overcome with emotion and has to wipe away tears of gratitude. She is lucky to be here, holding her baby.

At a school in San Francisco, Governor Newsom announced plans to add the COVID-19 vaccine to the list of vaccinations required to attend school in-person when the vaccine receives full approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for middle and high school grades, making California the first state in the nation to announce such a measure. Following the other first-in-the-nation school masking and staff vaccination measures, Governor Newsom announced the COVID-19 vaccine will be required for in-person school attendance—just like vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella and more.

Johnson & Johnson asked the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday to allow extra shots of its COVID-19 vaccine as the U.S. government moves toward expanding its booster campaign to millions more vaccinated Americans.

President Joe Biden is set to push well-off nations to do more to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control around the world, as world leaders, aid groups and global health organizations sound the alarm about the slow pace of global vaccinations.

Racial disparities narrow on vaccines Since vaccines became available last winter, they’ve gone disproportionately to white people over Black and Hispanic people. But that may be starting to change, writes Nada Hassanein in USA Today. In recent weeks, as cases have soared, more people of color received a first shot, compared to their overall population share, than white people. “It shows a glint of promise,” experts told Hassanein. In Southern states where the delta variant is raging, Black and Hispanic vaccination rates are rising particularly fast, according to Bloomberg Equality’s COVID-19 tracker — but, “overall, states are still generally lagging in vaccinating Black and Hispanic people.” Those analyses are based on government data, which are incomplete, but an NBC News poll suggests a different picture: When asked, 76% of Black respondents said they’d been vaccinated, along with 71% of Latinos and just 66% of whites.