Covid-19 Policy Update #628

Thursday 1/26

Jan 27, 2023

Top Three

FDA Advisors Recommend Replacing Original Covid Vaccine With Bivalent Omicron Shots For All Doses: The FDA vaccine advisory group unanimously recommended streamlining COVID-19 vaccine campaigns by offering just the newer bivalent (two-strain) versions of the vaccine for both primary and booster series.

CNBC: "The FDA has proposed moving to a system that resembles how the agency updates and rolls out flu shots every year. The agency would select a Covid vaccine formulation in June to target the variant that is expected to dominate in the fall and winter. That formulation would be used by all manufacturers for all doses."
CIDRAP: "Some members said it's premature to say COVID-19 has seasonality and questioned whether there are enough data to settle on a schedule consisting of one dose for most people in the fall to provide optimal protection. Peter Marks, MD, PhD, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics and Research, said the virus is starting to show some seasonality, but a major consideration is when hospitals would be most overwhelmed, which is in the winter when multiple respiratory viruses are circulating."
More via NPR, NYT, WSJ.
Stat with the liveblog of the meeting.
- "Ruth Link-Gelles, a Covid vaccine expert at the CDC, said data on Moderna’s two-dose pediatric Covid vaccine suggests the vaccine effectiveness is 47% after one dose and 57% after two."
- "The picture is less impressive for the three-dose Pfizer-BioNTech pediatric vaccine. Link-Gelles said it isn’t currently possible to estimate the vaccine effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine after three doses, saying the estimates “don’t meet precision thresholds for interpretation.” She offered no further explanation."
- "Heather Scobie of the CDC, found that there was a surge of hospitalizations, not deaths, among very young children who had not yet been vaccinated. The cumulative rate of hospitalizations in young infants is higher than that for people between the ages of 50 and 64, and approaches that of those between 65 and 74. The highest rate of hospitalization by far is in those over 75 years."

Schools Speed Up Covid-Aid Spending After a Slow Start: Via the WSJ.

"Districts have drawn on about a quarter of the $122 billion in federal money, up from 7% in May."
"Illinois has spent about 32% of its $4.8 billion in federal pandemic relief and is on track to meet the deadline for depleting the funds, Mr. Mohip said. Salaries are the largest category for schools’ pandemic relief spending in the state, accounting for almost 37% of those expenditures, he said."
"New York City’s school system, the largest in the U.S., has used about the same percentage, spending more than $1.5 billion of the $4.8 billion it received, according to city education officials. New York City is allocating just over 30% of the money for academic recovery efforts such as literacy programs."

A Teacher Shortage So Acute That Students Are Expected to Learn Without One: Via the Washington Post.

"In rural Mississippi, the geometry teacher is a recording. The chemistry students often teach themselves. Rural and Southern states face a crisis."
"Researchers trying to understand the teacher shortage could find sufficient data for only 37 states, and among those, Mississippi’s was the worst. For every 10,000 students there, 69 teacher positions are unfilled or filled by someone without traditional credentials. That’s 159 times the ratio in Missouri, according to their working paper, published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform."
Related: A Practical Toolkit for Leaders to Address Teacher Shortages: Via Bellwether and Overdeck.

Federal

ED: Secretary Cardona highlighted the key focus areas of “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” (Press Release / Remarks)

Achieving Academic Excellence: Accelerating learning for every student; Deliver a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student.
Boldly Improve Learning Conditions: Eliminate the educator shortage for every school; Invest in every student’s mental health and well-being.
Creating Pathways for Global Engagements: Ensure every student has a pathway to college and career; Provide every student a pathway to multilingualism.

ED: Dear Colleague Letter: Leveraging Federal Funds for Teaching and Learning with Technology.

New Trump Education Plan: Politico: "Trump unveils new education policy loaded with culture war proposals."

"The plan, shared in advance with POLITICO, calls for cutting federal funding for any school or program that includes “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.” It also calls for opening “civil rights investigations into any school district that has engaged in race-based discrimination,” particularly against Asian American students, and promises to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
"He also calls for cutting administrative roles, and adopting a “parental bill of rights.”

Covid Research

Home COVID Tests Lead to Vast Undercount of Cases, Positivity Rates: JAMA Research Letter

Reframing the Conversation About Child and Adolescent Vaccinations: The AAP on a new report that includes five recommendations for communicating about vaccinations:

Talk about the benefits of vaccination for the common good.
Talk about improving vaccination access as a preventative public health measure.
Focus on how vaccines are beneficial to children’s long-term health and wellbeing.
Use a computer updates metaphor to explain how the immune system improves its performance through vaccination.
Use a literacy metaphor to explain how the immune system learns how to respond to viruses through vaccination.

New Study Finds Vaccines Are Safe and Effective for Kids: ABC News on a new study.

"Two doses of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine among school-aged children safely and effectively reduces COVID-19 infection risk as well as associated risks for developing multisystem inflammatory syndrome and COVID-19 related hospitalizations."
"Researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center analyzed rates of COVID-19 infection, symptom severity and vaccine side effects among 10,935,541 vaccinated children aged 5 to 11 years compared to 2,635,251 unvaccinated children."
"They found vaccinated children had lower rates of infection and less severe symptoms if they did end up infected. Severe reactions to the shot were rare and any local injection irritation went away after several days. The low rates of severe side effects should be reassuring for parents and guardians worried about adverse events following vaccination, according to the study's authors."
"The study also found only a small increase in risk for kids to develop inflammation of the heart (myocarditis) after COVID-19 vaccination. It found that there are 1.8 cases of myocarditis per million children who get two doses of the vaccine, a comparable or slightly higher rate than in children diagnosed with myocarditis before the COVID-19 pandemic."

Economic Recovery

GDP: GDP rose 2.9% in the fourth quarter, more than expected even as recession fears loom.

Consumer spending weakened from the previous period but remained positive.
Consumer spending, which accounts for about 68% of GDP, increased 2.1% for the period, down slightly from 2.3% in the previous period but still positive.

Remote Workers Commute Less, Work More: Axios on new NBER research.

Working from home saved workers around the world an average of 72 minutes in commuting time every day in 2021 and 2022.
40% of workers used the time saved to work on either a primary or secondary job.
34% used the time for leisure activities, including exercise or watching TV, and 11% used it for caregiving.

The Pandemic Surge in Entrepreneurship is Still Going Strong: Axios on new EIG research.

Nearly 1.7 million applications for businesses likely to hire employees were filed in 2022—a 27.8 percent increase over the prepandemic baseline—and the second largest total on record.

New Childcare Data Shows Prices Are Untenable for Families: Via DOL.

Resources

Call to Effective Action Grant Program: Via Accelerate.

Two types of grants available in 2023:
- Innovation Grants (up to $150,000 each) are available to scalable tutoring models that do not yet have preliminary or early-stage evidence of impact on student outcomes The purpose of these grants is to help high-potential models develop, be implemented as intended, and collect initial evidence.
- Promise Grants (up to $250,000 each) are available to scalable, established tutoring models that have generated some evidence suggesting positive impacts on student outcomes. The purpose of these grants is to support program implementation with fidelity to the model's core components and to further develop the respective model's evidence base.
Eligible applicants include:
- Tutoring providers (nonprofit and for-profit)
- Public school districts; public charter schools and management organizations
- Colleges and universities
- Support organizations (nonprofit and for-profit), such as education intermediaries and organizations supporting data infrastructure
- Research firms, university-based researchers, and individual researchers

Cardona’s Tutoring Charge, 1 Year Later: Some Progress, but Obstacles Remain: Via The 74.

National Study Reveals 1 in 4 Teachers Altering Lesson Plans Due to Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws: Via The 74.

Youth Mental Health:

NGA: Governors Murphy, Polis Join Forces To Tackle Youth Mental Health Crisis
A new Pew survey found that four-in-ten parents say they are extremely or very worried that their children might struggle with anxiety or depression.
Gov. Edwards (D-WI) proposed $500 million more overall for mental health and behavioral services, including $270 million dedicated to expand services in schools.
Gov. Murphy (D-NJ) announced an expansion of the Behavioral Healthcare Provider Loan Redemption Program that provides $180,000 in student loan forgiveness for those working as a behavioral health provider in New Jersey.
Gov. Cox (R-UT) says his state plans to sue social media companies over alleged harm to children, comparing prominent apps to pharmaceutical companies that make opioids.
Kentucky Student Voice Team interviewed 50 teens which surfaced mental health as a top concern. Potential strategies include: Consider adding in student mental health days; Carry out mental health check in surveys with students; Integrate mindfulness/meditation/relaxation opportunities in school.
German teens went crazy for an app that allows them to send anonymous compliments.
London-headquartered Limbic has achieved the world's first certification for its AI mental health chatbot that predicts disorders with a 93% accuracy. The Class IIa UKCA medical device certification makes it the first and only AI mental health chatbot in the world to earn this status for its clinical effectiveness, safety and risk management.
Instagram launched new features for teens including a Quiet mode that turns off notifications and sends an auto-reply when someone sends them a direct message, new ways to manage recommendations, and also new parent control functionality.

This Dad Was Suspicious: But his daughter still got him.

When A Disability Disappears: Josiah Johnson is a 13-year-old from Kentucky who was born without legs. But that didn't stop him from trying out for his middle school basketball team and proving that even when the odds are stacked against you, to never give up on your dreams.