Top Three
FDA Sets June for Potential Decision or Under 5s: FDA announces tentative schedule for vaccine advisory meetings:
June 7: Novavax
June 8, 21, 22: Moderna & Pfizer/BioNTech in younger populations
June 28: Discussion of strain selection for fall
Vaccines for Young Children: Via David Leonhardt: "The federal government is telling us two different stories."
"Why hasn’t the F.D.A. approved a Covid-19 vaccine for children under 5? Government officials have given two conflicting answers in recent days — one that places responsibility on vaccine manufacturers, another that casts the lack of approval as a deliberate federal policy."
"When F.D.A. officials have spoken publicly about the lack of a vaccine for young children, they have put the onus on Moderna and Pfizer, the vaccine makers. The officials have suggested that the companies have not completed their portion of the regulatory process."
"This planned delay raises two big questions. One, why does the government think Americans are incapable of handling different approval dates?... Two, why is the federal government telling us conflicting stories — one in which the F.D.A. is deliberately delaying approval and another in which the agency is merely waiting for Moderna and Pfizer to submit the necessary information?"
"I posed these questions to Biden administration officials yesterday, and the answers were fascinating."
“If the stars align, we would like that to happen,” an administration official told me. “However, we are not going to put ourselves in a situation where we sit on data.” If one company’s timetable is only a few days or weeks ahead the other’s, the F.D.A. will wait to act on both at once. If the gap is longer, the agency will act on either Moderna or Pfizer without waiting for the other."
"Public health officials in this country are often uncomfortable trying to convey the full truth. They worry that people will misunderstand the details and behave dangerously. Instead, the officials provide only partial truths and hope that Americans won’t notice. The strategy hasn’t been very successful."
Enrollment Dropped. Absences Soared: How one Arizona school is fighting pandemic learning loss.
"The Republic analysis showed that Hispanic students made up about 45% of the 2020 enrollment drop."
"At Galveston Elementary School, Alcala has seen an increase in students missing school. The daily absentee rate jumped from about 7% in January 2019 to about 16% in January of this year, Alcala said. That amounts to about 36 more students missing school per day."
"In May 2021, 22% of all K-8 students in Arizona were chronically absent. That was up 8 percentage points compared with prepandemic May 2019. That amounts to about 52,000 more chronically absent students."
"About 42% of Dysart Unified School District's students are Latino. The district offered a double session of summer school last year by providing additional pay to teachers using the funding, said Shelly Isai, Dysart's director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for high school. The district added tutoring on Saturdays and before and after school to provide extra support to students, she said."
"Three Dysart high schools ranked among the top 10 schools with the largest number of enrollment drops in 2020, according to The Republic's analysis. Valley Vista lost 667 students, a 25% decrease; Willow Canyon lost 597 students, a 30% decrease; and Dysart High School lost 502 students, a 31% decrease."
"Isai said the decreases were caused in large part by students who transferred to iSchool, the district's online school. Enrollment at the district's iSchool jumped from 46 in 2019 to 1,725 in 2020, school officials said. Some students transferred to other schools within the district or to schools outside the district, she said."
Federal
WHCA Dinner: Happy Nerd Prom weekend to all that celebrate.
FCC: Opens third and likely final round of funding to address homework gap.
"So far, the ECF has paid for more than 10 million internet-enabled devices and 5 million broadband connections, according to the FCC."
"Funding can cover laptops and tablets, Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, routers and broadband connections for off-campus use by students, school staff and library patrons in need, even if schools have returned to full-time, in-person instruction."
Covid-19 Research
Why Are Vaccines Still Important If So Many Kids Have Already Had COVID-19? Via Fox:
"As we all know and have heard before, the COVID vaccine was developed to reduce severe infection and reduce hospitalization and death — and it is still doing that," said Melissa Marx, an assistant professor and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health."
"Vaccines have absolutely changed childhood survival in this country and around the world, and the COVID vaccine is no exception. There is, in my mind, no reason not to get a potentially life-saving, preventative vaccine," Marx added."
"Studies have shown that previous infection can protect some people against severe disease and hospitalization, but much remains unclear — including how much protection and for how long once they recover."
"If FDA clears vaccinations for the littlest, next the CDC would have to recommend who needs them — all tots or just those at higher risk from COVID-19 — which could potentially open the shots by summer."
Hyper Inflammatory Syndrome Following COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine in Children: New study.
"Very few cases of hyper-inflammatory syndrome with multi-organ involvement occurred following COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in 12–17-year-old children."
Researchers Deploy Machine Learning to Unravel Long Covid’s Mysteries: Via Stat.
"By far the largest source of real-world data on long Covid is a first-of-its-kind centralized federal database of electronic health records called the National Covid Cohort Collaborative, or N3C."
"Kickstarted with $25 million in NIH funding early in the pandemic, N3C now includes de-identified patient data from 72 sites around the country, representing 13 million patients and nearly 5 million Covid cases."
"That work has started to trace a clearer picture of long Covid, but having a firmer understanding of how to define the syndrome could also potentially support ongoing recruitment efforts for critical long Covid trials."
State
California:
L.A. schools chief pushes to delay student COVID vaccination mandate
New poll shows Californians concerned about impact of COVID-19 school restrictions on students.
International
China: Via Goldman: China is heading for a 'perfect storm' of economic headwinds: Against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, COVID-19 lockdowns and ongoing supply chain bottlenecks, investors are reevaluating their exposure to China.
“We are in a ‘perfect storm’ situation where we have a number of economic and regulation headwinds all going against the market at the same time,” Goldman Sachs Research’s Kinger Lau, chief China equity strategist, says: Coronavirus cases are still elevated; Chinese equites have been under pressure, trading below their historical averages; expect slower economic growth."
Hong Kong: Choice of British curriculum in Hong Kong makes good sense for students during Covid-19 pandemic uncertainty
South Africa: "At a briefing today, South Africa's Health Minister Joe Phaahla said as of Apr 25, cases were up 137% compared to the week before, mainly driven by infections in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and Western Cape provinces. However, he said hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions remain stable."
Economic Recovery
Hybrid Work is Just Not Working Well For Women: Via Fortune.
Women fear retaliation for their hybrid work structures, an arrangement that’s often sold as a boon for work-life flexibility.
Of the 44% of women surveyed by Deloitte who work in some form of a hybrid work structure, almost two-thirds report that their employers haven’t set clear expectations around hybrid work, and 94% fear that asking for a more flexible work schedule will hurt their chance for a promotion.
Resources
Latino Teachers Matter: According to a new study.
Third Pandemic Summer Brings Momentum for ARP Investments: Via K12 Dive.
How Parents’ Views of Their Kids’ Screen Time, Social Media Use Changed During COVID-19: Via Pew.
How Social and Emotional Learning Became a New Front in the Culture Wars: Via Rick Hess.
The Education Culture War is Raging. But for Most Parents, It's Background Noise: Via NPR.
Real-time Monitoring of Mobile Phones: Northing to do with Covid or education but this was getting shared and discussed in some of my circles this week so I’m sharing it with you:
"Anomaly Six (A6), a Virginia-based open source intelligence company, says it can provide real-time monitoring of billions of mobile phones using nothing more than data anyone can buy, according to The Intercept (with a video demonstration)
"The company was reportedly able to identify 183 phones that had visited both agencies, suggesting the owners were almost assuredly members of the U.S. intelligence community."
"Using a tweeted satellite photo of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea, A6 was able to extract a timestamp and the latitude and longitude coordinates of the ship from the picture, and then look for a mobile phone pinging from that location at that time. They found one and, looking at that device's GPS history, were able to see the ship’s transit all the way back to Norfolk, Virginia."
More via Klon Kitchen over at the Dispatch. "And here’s the crazy part: This isn’t anywhere near the creepiest stuff that can be done with this information (I won’t be giving anyone any ideas.) The sad truth is that this data horse is so far outside of the barn that I’m not sure we’ll ever get it back. But this makes it even more important that the United States start thinking more carefully about the national security implications of our private data markets, because I guarantee our global rivals are."
Covid-19 Precautions in Schools: Via EdNext:
Time for a New Normal: By Paymon Rouhanifard and Dr. Shira Doron
Tie Precautions to Community Risk Levels: By Gerard Bossard and Dr. Douglas Rothman
Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future: By John Bailey. (Here's a version with links)
102 Marathons, 102 Days: Jacky Hunt-Broersma — a 46-year-old from Arizona who runs on a blade because of an amputation — yesterday hit 102 marathons in 102 days.
Related: My Apple Watch praised me for closing my Move activity ring today.
Just a Bear: Pulling off some serious Mission Impossible moves to get some bird seed.