News Briefs
SAFETY Officials plan extra scrutiny of vaccine
Facing public skepticism about rushed COVID-19 vaccines, U.S. health officials are planning extra scrutiny of the first people vaccinated when shots become available — an added safety layer experts call vital.
A new poll suggests those vaccine fears are growing. With this week’s pause of a second major vaccine study because of an unexplained illness — and repeated tweets from President Donald Trump that raise the specter of politics overriding science — a quarter of Americans say they won’t get vaccinated. That’s a slight increase from 1 in 5 in May.
The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only 46% of Americans want a COVID-19 vaccine and another 29% are unsure.
More striking, while Black Americans have been especially hard-hit by COVID-19, just 22% say they plan to get vaccinated compared with 48% of white Americans, the AP-NORC poll found.
“I am very concerned about hesitancy regarding COVID vaccine,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine specialist at Vanderbilt University who says even the primary care doctors who’ll need to recommend vaccinations have questions.
“If the politicians would stand back and let the scientific process work, I think we’d all be better off,” he added.
The stakes are high: Shunning a COVID-19 shot could derail efforts to end the pandemic — while any surprise safety problems after one hits the market could reverberate into distrust of other routine vaccines.
On top of rigorous final testing in tens of thousands of people, any COVID-19 vaccines cleared for widespread use will get additional safety evaluation as they’re rolled out. Among plans from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
Texting early vaccine recipients to check how they’re feeling, daily for the first week and then weekly out to six weeks.
Any vaccine before Election Day is extremely unlikely. Over Trump’s objections, the Food and Drug Administration issued clear safety and effectiveness standards that shots must meet — and Commissioner Stephen Hahn insists career scientists, not politicians, will decide each possible vaccine’s fate only after all the evidence is debated at a public meeting.
WASHINGTON First lady: Barron now negative for COVID-19
Melania Trump says her 14-year-old son, Barron, had tested positive for the coronavirus but has since tested negative.
The White House initially said he had tested negative, after both of his parents tested positive earlier this month.
The first lady said Wednesday that subsequent testing showed Barron had also come down with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
He has since tested negative, she said, as have both she and President Donald Trump.
After she and the president received their positive results Oct. 1, Mrs. Trump wrote that “naturally, my mind went immediately to our son.”
He tested negative and she was relieved, but kept thinking about what would happen the next day and the day after that.
“My fear came true when he was tested again and it came up positive,” she said in a lengthy note released on social media.
She said Barron is a “strong teenager” who exhibited no symptoms. Sounding a bit like the president, she said she was “glad the three of us went through this at the same time so we could take care of one another and spend time together.”
She said her son has since tested negative.
The first lady has guarded the privacy of her teenage son. She did not explain why his positive diagnosis was not made public earlier.
EUROPE Milan hospitals under pressure again
Coronavirus infections are surging anew in the northern Italian region where the pandemic first took hold in Europe, putting pressure again on hospitals and health care workers.
At Milan’s San Paolo hospital, a ward dedicated to coronavirus patients and outfitted with breathing machines reopened this weekend, a sign that the city and the surrounding area is entering a new emergency phase of the pandemic.
For the medical personnel who fought the virus in Italy’s hardest-hit region of Lombardy in the spring, the long-predicted resurgence came too soon.
“On a psychological level, I have to say I still have not recovered,” said nurse Cristina Settembrese, referring to last March and April when Lombardy accounted for nearly half of the dead and one-third of the nation’s coronavirus cases.
“In the last five days, I am seeing many people who are hospitalized who need breathing support,” Settembrese said.Months after Italy eased one of the globe’s toughest lockdowns, the country on Wednesday posted its highest ever daily total of new infections at 7,332 — surpassing the previous high of 6,557, recorded during the virus’s most deadly phase in March. Lombardy is again leading the nation in case numbers, an echo of the trauma of March and April when ambulance sirens pierced the silence of stilled cities.
Increased testing is partially responsible for the high numbers, and many of the new cases are asymptomatic. So far, Italy’s death toll remains significantly below the spring heights, hovering around 40 in recent days. That compares with the high of 969 dead nationwide one day in late March.