Top Three
FDA Grants Full Approval to Pfizer COVID Vaccine for Ages 12-15: "The FDA said on Friday the full approval follows a rigorous analysis and evaluation of the safety and effectiveness data. The vaccine was approved for use in those aged 16 and older in August last year."
Jobs Report: BLS reports the economy added 372,000 jobs in June, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.6%.
"June’s big payroll jump helped clear away some recession fears for an economy that still could see consecutive quarters of negative growth," reports CNBC.
“But the strength of the report, which also showed bigger wage gains than expected, could give the Federal Reserve more leeway for tough medicine to beat back inflation. Now, all eyes will be watching whether the Fed’s strategy of raising interest rates pushes the country into a recession that inflicts harsh pain,” reports the NYT.
“Employment is now just a touch away from prepandemic levels, down 524,000, or 0.3 percent, from February 2020. A recovery in private-sector job creation is responsible for the overall gains. Government employment has lagged, with a shortfall of 664,000.”
"The US employment report for June continues to show a strong labor market consistent with a strong economy with moderating inflationary pressure," reports PIIE.
The Nation Faces School Attendance and Graduation Crises: Via Governing.
"For K-12 students, chronic absence, generally defined as missing 10 percent or more of school days, has escalated into a “full-scale crisis” since 2019, says a new report from the nonprofit Attendance Works, with two- and threefold increases in many states. The levels are highest among low-income and minority students, it says, from the same communities most affected by the pandemic in other ways."
"Almost 10 percent of the school population seems to have disappeared,” says Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA)."
"States can play an important role in reducing chronic attendance by taking steps such as adopting common standards for measuring attendance, investments in data quality, expanded metrics and publishing disaggregated data, says Chang. “We can make data even more meaningful in the future, so people can use it for allocating resources or identifying best practices.”
"Solutions will vary from school to school and family to family and, until COVID-19 moves further into the background, some might not be fully in the hands of schools, says DQC’s Paige Kowalski. But regardless of why a student didn’t come to school, simply knowing that they didn’t is critical."
Federal
White House: President Biden awards Medal of Freedom to Sandra Lindsay, NY nurse who received the first COVID vaccine in the US.
Army: “Some 40,000 National Guard and 22,000 Reserve soldiers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 are no longer allowed to participate in their military duties, also effectively cutting them off from some of their military benefits,” Military.com reports.
FDA: WSJ "FDA Will Help Overseas Baby-Formula Makers Keep Selling in U.S. Beyond Shortages."
The National Partnership for Student Success: Some confusion coming out of the Administration's announcement mostly centered around two issues. First, some of the privacy groups are pointing out that the project is collecting data through forms on the website but without a privacy policy. So it's unclear who is receiving the data or how it's being used or shared. Second, there seems to be some confusion if this is a project within the Federal government or a new non-profit.
Covid-19 Research
Unders 5s: Nearly 300,000 children under 5 have received COVID-19 shots in the two weeks since they’ve become available.
Pfizer also submitted a variation to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) requesting to update the Conditional Marketing Authorization (CMA) in the European Union (EU) with data supporting the vaccination of children ages 6 months to less than 5 years.
New Covid Tests: Roche Diagnostics said that it has begun "deploying its newly authorized cobas coronavirus diagnostic to hospitals and reference laboratories, with a wave of 400,000 swab-testing kits expected to arrive this week."
The company estimates the fully automated test can deliver 384 results per eight-hour shift on its cobas 6800 system, and 960 on its larger cobas 8800. Results are available in about three-and-a-half hours after the test begins.
Scott Gottlieb praised the approval saying, "Will substantially increase patient testing capacity by end of next week by tens of thousands a day across all labs, commercial and academic."
Approved At-Home Test for Covid and Influenza: "The FDA greenlights a combination at-home test for COVID and influenza in children." Labcorp Press Release.
College COVID-19 Testing Can Reduce Covid Deaths in Local Communities: "Counties where colleges and universities did COVID-19 testing saw fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths than ones with schools that did not do any testing in the fall of 2020, researchers report June 23 in PLOS Digital Health."
Wastewater Surveillance Tool Detects SARS-CoV-2 Variants Earlier, Cheaper: Via CIDRAP:
"Scientists at Scripps Research Institute and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have developed a wastewater surveillance tool that—with just 2 teaspoons of raw sewage—can identify the SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating in a population and detect new variants of concern up to 2 weeks before clinical sequencing can." Study / Press Release
The First Four Healthy Building Strategies Every Building Should Pursue to Reduce Risk from COVID-19: Resource from The Lancet COVID-19 Commission Task Force on Safe Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel.
Eric Topol: Is disappointed with the CDC.
Community-level Risk: An ‘Uninformative’ Guide for Covid-19 Prevention: Argues Sheldon Jacobson in Stat.
Studying Long Covid: NIH is "rolling out one of the largest studies in the world to understand long Covid."
"The $1.15 billion taxpayer-funded study, called Recover, aims to enroll nearly 40,000 people by the end of this year. It will follow those participants over four years, comparing people with Covid to those who’ve never had it, with the goal of identifying all the long-term symptoms and finding out how the virus is causing them."
"The Patient-Led Research Collaborative said there were more than 200 long Covid symptoms across 10 organ systems, according to a study published last year in The Lancet."
"The Recover study aims to complete enrollment of more than 17,000 adults by September and 20,000 children by the end of the year."
Operation Warp Speed Should Not have Been Disbanded: Via Alex Tabarrok:
"Operation Warp Speed produced a new vaccine for a novel virus in record time but when Operation Warp Speed was disbanded by the Biden administration vaccine research and development slowed from warp speed to impulse power."
"It’s ridiculous that it is taking longer to develop and deploy tweaks to the mRNA vaccines to deal with new variants than it took to develop the original vaccines from scratch. By the time we get an Omicron-specific vaccine that variant will have disappeared. This is no way to run a civilization."
We Could Have Universal COVID Vaccines Very Soon — If We Urgently Reform the Process: Argues Stripe CEO Patrick Collison:
"COVID will very likely continue to mutate and cause problems until we create vaccines that inhibit transmission (which probably means nasal/mucosal membrane vaccines) and vaccines that confer better overall immunity across all COVID-19 variants."
"We (Fast Grants) are in touch with a number of these groups. Despite excellent technology and promising early results in animal models, we estimate that the very earliest we will have access to these vaccines in humans is 2024."
"Broadly speaking, the holdups involve some combination of logistical challenges and regulatory requirements, and the intersection between both. (You don’t in principle have to run a primate trial, but the FDA makes it harder to run a human trial if you don’t. You don’t in principle need to use “acute infection” as a trial endpoint; you could also use neutralizing antibody titers, which would be much faster and simpler.)"
"We should lower the barrier for human clinical trials and use simpler endpoints. For many vaccine candidates, we could run human trials concurrent with primate trials (once basic safety data has been obtained). In humans, we don’t need to repeat Phase I trials for platforms that have already been validated and derisked. (In this vein, the FDA’s recent announcement about not requiring trials for updated platforms was encouraging.)"
"We should help these groups to scale manufacturing faster. Operation Warp Speed itself cost $10 billion; a second incarnation, with a tenth of that budget, could almost certainly accomplish a great deal."
State
Idaho: "Parents with income levels at or below $60,000 per year can apply for grants this summer created by the Idaho State Board of Education to help with their children’s education."
Oklahoma: Gov. Kevin Stitt calls for special audit of Tulsa Public Schools alleging that the district potentially mishandled COVID-19 relief funds and possibly broke state law by teaching critical race theory.
South Carolina: How one rural SC school district is tackling the in-school therapist shortage.
Resources
Rare Moment: Once a year, for a rare moment at 7:15 AM EDT on July 8th, 99% of the world's population will be in the Sun. About 6.4 billion people in the daytime, while more than 1.2 billion people experience twilight.
Schools Can Do More Than ‘Return to Normal.’ Here’s How: Michael Horn, "The pandemic can spark lasting change—or it can reinforce the status quo."
States Eye "Baby Bonds" to Address Wealth Gaps: Via Axios.
It's The Weekend: Go give someone a hug.