whh3 writes: The NIAID issued a statement early Tuesday saying that they had concerns about the data that AstraZeneca included in their Monday-morning release touting the effectiveness of their Covid-19 vaccine. Slashdot reader phalse phace has shared additional information via The Hill. They write: U.S. health officials from the Data and Safety Monitoring Board issued an unusual statement that it was "concerned by information released by AstraZeneca on initial data from its COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial." This comes less than 24 hours after AstraZeneca said its vaccine had an "efficacy of 79% at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% efficacy at preventing severe disease and hospitalization" and a week after several countries suspended dosing of the vaccine due to concerns of dangerous blood clots.

The Data and Safety Monitoring Board "expressed concern that AstraZeneca may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data." As an oversight committee, the Data and Safety Monitoring Board helps regulate and evaluate clinical trials of new medicines to ensure accuracy and adherence to protocols. In a statement released early Tuesday morning, AstraZeneca said the interim results it announced on Monday were current as of Feb. 17. The latest development could throw a wrench in AstraZeneca's plan to seek the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization for its vaccine. Additional coverage: The New York Times

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, hospitals are blocking confidential prices from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites. It's problematic because pricing information for hospital services must be disclosed under a new federal price transparency rule that went into effect on Jan. 1. Becker's Hospital Review reports: The code prevents pages from appearing in searches, such as a hospital's name and prices, computer experts told the Journal. While the prices are still there, it requires clicking through multiple layers of pages to find them. "It's technically there, but good luck finding it," Chirag Shah, an associate computer professor at the University of Washington, told the Journal. "It's one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it's another thing to tag it so it can't be searched. It's a clear indication of intentionality."

Hospitals burying their pricing data include those owned by HCA Healthcare and Universal Health Services as well as the University of Pennsylvania Health System, NYU Langone Health, Beaumont Health and Novant Health, according to the Journal. Penn Medicine, NYU Langone Health and Novant Health told the publication they used the blocking code to direct patients first to information they "considered more useful than raw pricing data," for which they included web links. UHS uses the blocking code to ensure consumers acknowledge a disclosure statement before viewing prices and is making no effort to hide information, a hospital spokesperson told the Journal.

After the Journal reached out to hospitals about its discovery, the search-blocking code was removed from sites including those of HCA, Penn Medicine, Beaumont, Avera Health, Ballad Health and Northern Light Health. An HCA spokesperson told the publication the search blocker was "a legacy code that we removed," and Avera, Ballad, Beaumont and Northern Light said the code had been left on their websites by mistake.

The BBC reports: The number of daily Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the UK has hit a record high for a third consecutive day. A combined total of 844,285 first or second doses were given on Saturday, up from 711,157 on Friday. On Twitter, Prime Minister Boris Johnson thanked "everyone involved".

More than 27.6 million people in the UK — more than half the adult population — have now received at least one dose of a vaccine... Of the vaccinations administered on Saturday, 752,308 were first doses and 91,977 were second, meaning 2,228,772 people in the UK have now been fully vaccinated.
How does that compare to other regions? In the USA — which has roughly five times the UK's population — 81.4 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine, representating about 24.5% of the eligible population. But 41.9 million Americans have been fully vaccinated (according to figures compiled by the Washington Post).

And here's some more figures from the Los Angeles Times, including vaccination stats for the state of California — roughly 60% of the UK's population: The last six days have seen the six highest single-day totals of shots given out statewide, according to data compiled by the Los Angeles Times. During that stretch, roughly 2.35 million doses were administered statewide — including 344,489 on Thursday and 387,015 on Friday... To date, nearly 13.8 million shots have been administered statewide [and] 23.5% of Californians have received at least one vaccine dose — a proportion that ranks 33rd out of all states and U.S. territories, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By comparison, 31.4% of New Mexico's population has gotten at least one shot, as have 29.6% of Alaskans and 29% of those living in South Dakota. California measures up better compared with more populous states. As of Friday, 24.3% of residents had received one shot in Pennsylvania, 24.2% in New York, 22.2% in Florida and 20.9% in Texas, CDC data show.. Roughly 11.8% of all Californians have been fully vaccinated. California is somewhat ahead of the national curve when it comes to vaccinating its older residents. Roughly 71.9% of residents ages 65 and older have received at least one dose, according to the CDC, compared with the nationwide figure of 67.1%.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a discussion between a 77-year-old "father of the internet" and a 75-year-old "father of public key cryptography". Long before Vinton Cerf and Martin Hellman changed the world with their inventions, they were young assistant professors at Stanford University who became fast friends... More than 50 years and two technological revolutions later, the friendship between Vint and Marty — as they know each other — endures. This is despite, or perhaps because of, their sometimes different views. You see, while they do not always agree, they both enjoy a good intellectual debate, especially when the humans they sought to bring together with their inventions face existential threats.

Not long after giving the world public key cryptography, Hellman switched his focus from encryption to efforts that might avoid nuclear war. "What's the point of developing new algorithms if there's not likely to be anybody around in 50-100 years?" Hellman recalls thinking at the time... On a recent private phone call with each other, the two friends discussed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's project seeking to answer the question, "Should the U.S. use quantitative methods to assess the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism?"

While both agree that the US needs to understand the risk of nuclear war, they disagree about whether a quantitative analysis is necessary.
"Quantitative estimates run either the real or perceived risk of being twisted to support whatever conclusion is desired," Cerf argues — while sharing instead an analogy he believes illustrates the risks of the 13,410 nuclear weapons currently in the world (91% divided between Russia and the U.S.)

But Hellman counters that "When the risk is highly uncertain, how do you determine who's right?" He ultimately suggests quantifying the risks would make society more fully aware of the stakes.

"I hope you will agree with either my quantitative approach or Vint's qualitative approach," Hellman concludes, "both of which conclude that the risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high and risk reduction measures are urgently needed." But for those who accept neither approach, Hellman adds two questions:

• What evidence supports the belief that the risk of nuclear deterrence failing is currently at an acceptable level?
• Can we responsibly bet humanity's existence on a strategy for which the risk of failure is totally unknown?

If you were on the call — what would you say?

"If that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred," says Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. "We may never have even known about it!"

Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that "The coronavirus pandemic almost didn't happen." Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," Worobey told CNN...

The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread... The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said... What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said.

"It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said...

In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and that the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge -- cancer. Ozlem Tureci, who founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, Ugur Sahin, was working on a way to harness the body's immune system to tackle tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus infecting people in China. Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they'd been researching for two decades to the new threat.

Britain authorized BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for use in December, followed a week later by Canada. Dozens of other countries, including the U.S., have followed suit and tens of millions of people worldwide have since received the shot developed together with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. [...] As BioNTech's profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, adding much-needed funds the company will be able to use to pursue its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer. The vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.

"We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA," said Tureci. Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said "that's very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people." For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure the vaccines governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.

Microsoft unveiled new technology to boost government and health care organizations' vaccine management systems, including scheduling shot appointments and monitoring results, to fix shortcomings weeks after the company's initial custom-built programs ran aground in a few states. From a report: The Microsoft Vaccine Management product released Friday is made up of features and new apps that the software company said will improve upon and fix the glitches that occurred when its previous effort, the Vaccination Registration and Application System, failed to work properly in New Jersey and Washington D.C. The new software "incorporates lessons learned from VRAS regarding scalable architecture, improved user experiences for residents and health care workers," the company said in an email. It also uses health care standards for information transfer so data can be exported more quickly to other record systems, such as electronic medical records. The software also addresses other issues that hampered the previous option, including requiring users to pre-register before seeking a Covid-19 vaccine appointment and providing a way to proactively handle spikes in demand.

A digital certificate to kick-start foreign travel should be given to citizens across the EU "without discrimination," officials say. From a report: The aim is to enable anyone vaccinated against Covid-19, or who has tested negative or recently recovered from the virus to travel within the EU. The 27 member states will decide how to use the new digital certificate. Vaccine passports have faced opposition from some EU member states over concerns they might be discriminatory. Some argue that they would enable a minority to enjoy foreign travel without restrictions while others, such as young people who are not seen as a priority for inoculation, continue to face measures such as quarantine. European Commission officials have made clear they want to avoid discrimination.

Another issue raised has been that data on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing a person from carrying or passing on the virus is incomplete. Ahead of the EU's announcement, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was working to "create an international trusted framework" for safe travel, but that vaccinations should not be a condition. Separately, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to withhold exporting vaccines to the UK and any other countries outside the EU that do not supply doses in a reciprocal way. "We're still waiting for doses to come from the UK," she said. "So, this is an invitation to show us that there are also doses from the UK coming to the European Union."

A whole list of countries -- including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Latvia -- have suspended dosing of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine over reports of dangerous blood clots in some recipients. The company and international regulators say there is no evidence the shot is to blame, but that isn't stopping countries from taking action out of an abundance of caution. Derek Lowe, a medical chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, explains what's going on with this vaccine: I think that there are several distinct levels to this problem. The first, obviously, is medical. The big question is, are the reports of vascular problems greater than one would expect in the vaccinated population as a whole? It's not clear to me what the answer is, and it may very well be "No, they aren't." That CNBC link above quotes Michael Head at Southampton as saying that the data so far look like the problems show up at at least the same levels, and may even be lower in the vaccinated group. AstraZeneca has said that they're aware of 15 events of deep vein thrombosis and 22 events pulmonary embolisms, but that's in 17 million people who have had at least one shot -- and they say that is indeed "much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size." It also appears to be similar to what's been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines, which rather than meaning "they're all bad" looks like they're all showing the same baseline signal of such events across a broad population, without adding to it.

In that case, this could be an example of what I warned about back in December (and many others have warned about as well), the post hoc ergo propter hoc "false side effects" problem. I've been looking this morning, and so far have not found anyone clearly stating that the problems seen are running higher in the vaccinated patients [...]. I realize that there's a possibility (not a likely one, though) that some particular batch of vaccine is more problematic, but I haven't seen any solid evidence of that, either.

The second half of the medical problem is naturally what happens when you suspend dosing of what is, in many cases in the EU, the only vaccine available. We've been seeing cases falling here in the US ever since a peak on the first week of January -- many of us were worried about what might have been a rise in February but which now just seems to have been a plateau, with cases continuing to drop since then. But many European countries are definitely seeing another wave of infections, and the EU case numbers as a whole are going in the opposite direction to the US ones. There are surely a lot of reasons for this, with new viral variants being one, slow vaccine rollouts being another, and now complete vaccination halts set to add even more. Put as bluntly as possible, even if the AZ/Oxford vaccine has these side effects (which again, I don't see any evidence for yet), you are still very likely to kill more people by not giving it. Lowe goes on to question what good the EMA and World Health Organization's recommendations and regulatory approvals are when one European country after another shuts down its use.

He also brings up the third problem, which is public confidence. "The AZ/Oxford vaccine has been in trouble there since the day the first data came out," writes Lowe. "The efficacy numbers looked lower than the other vaccines that had reported by then, and as mentioned, the presentation of the data was really poorly handled and continued to be so for weeks. Now with these dosing suspensions, I have to wonder if this vaccine is ever going to lose the dark cloud it's currently sitting under..."

Germany on Monday halted use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, the Health Ministry announced in a statement, with Italy, France and Spain following suit later in the day. Several other EU countries have stopped use of the vaccine because of the possibility of blood clots. From a report: The Health Ministry announced that use of the vaccine was "suspended as a precaution" on the basis of advice from the national health regulator, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI). According to the Health Ministry, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will decide "whether and how the new information will affect the authorization of the vaccine" pending an investigation. "After new reports of thrombroses of the cerebral veins in connection with the vaccination in Germany and Europe, the PEI considers further investigations to be necessary," the Health Ministry announced. German Health Minister Jens Spahn said "the decision is a professional, not political one," following advice from the PEI. Spahn said the risk of blood clots from the AstraZeneca jab is low, but could not be ruled out. "The most important thing for confidence is transparency," Spahn said during a briefing.

The Washington Post reports: Facebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccination despite its availability, on social media — a primary source of health information for millions of people...

Its early findings suggest that a large amount of content that does not break the rules may be causing harm in certain communities, where it has an echo chamber effect... Just 10 out of the 638 population segments contained 50 percent of all vaccine hesitancy content on the platform. And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content... The research effort also discovered early evidence of significant overlap between communities that are skeptical of vaccines and those affiliated with QAnon, a sprawling set of baseless claims that has radicalized its followers and been associated with violent crimes, according to the documents...

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp messenger and Instagram, collects reams of data on its more than 3.3 billion users worldwide and has a broad reach onto those users' devices. Public health experts say that puts the company in a unique position to examine attitudes toward vaccines, testing and other behaviors and push information to people.

But the company has a steep hill to climb when it comes to proving that its research efforts serve the public because of its history of misusing people's data.
Facebook is removing content which violates its policies. Yet the documents obtained by the Post say "While research is very early, we're concerned that harm from non-violating content may be substantial."

Today much of the world honors an annual tradition: setting their clocks backwards by one hour. "I hope you enjoy it," writes Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby.

In an essay titled "Heed the science and abolish daylight saving time," Jacoby writes "I also hope this is the last year we have to go through this business of shifting our clocks ahead, and that by this time next year we'll be back on standard time for good." I am not a fan of daylight saving time, and if the polls are accurate, neither are most Americans. According to a 2019 survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of the public wants to put an end to the twice-yearly practice of changing clocks... Most of the rest of the world doesn't want it either. In Asia, Africa, and South America, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of Australia and many of the nations of the South Pacific eschew it, as do Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. The European Parliament voted by a large margin to end daylight saving time across the European Union, though whether to implement that change is left up to each EU member state...

The point of "saving" daylight was to save fuel: Congress believed that by shifting the clock so daylight extended later into the evening, the law would reduce demand for electricity and thereby conserve oil. But researchers attempting to measure the effects of clock-changing on energy savings have found them pretty elusive... But daylight saving time doesn't just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. All of which helps explain the growing chorus of scientists calling for an end to daylight saving time. The public-health problems stem not just from the loss of an hour of sleep once a year but from the ongoing disruption to the human circadian clock...

We should no longer be thinking about "springing forward" and "falling back" in terms of personal preference or convenience but should be focusing instead on the proven degradation to human well-being. Scientists now understand vastly more about the workings and importance of circadian rhythm than they did when clock-shifting was instituted decades ago. There is a growing medical consensus that what we've been doing with our clocks each spring is unhealthy.

It's time to stop doing it.

Eli Lilly and Company's experimental intravenous drug donanemab "could slow the cognitive decline of patients with Alzheimer's disease," reports CNN, citing early clinical trial results, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine: The study included 257 patients with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease; 131 received donanemab, while 126 received a placebo. The researchers found donanemab slowed the decline of cognition and daily function in Alzheimer's patients by 32% after 76 weeks, compared to those who received a placebo. Taken over 18 months, that 32% slowing of decline could be noticeably impactful for Alzheimer's patients, noted Maria Carrillo, chief science officer at the Alzheimer's Association, who was not involved in the study. "Out of 18 months, in comparison to the people that did not get the drug, these folks were declining six months slower," Carrillo said. "That's six more months of better cognition, better memories, better enjoyable times with your family...."

"This has a lot of potential," Carrillo added. "It could be a first step towards slowing more significantly, or stopping, cognitive decline in these earlier stages, which would really be transformational for our field..."

The researchers also looked at the drug's impact on the buildup of amyloid beta plaque and tau proteins, which are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. At 52 weeks, almost 60% of participants had reached amyloid-negative status, meaning their levels were at those of otherwise healthy people. At 76 weeks, amyloid plaque levels — measured in centiloids — decreased by 85 centiloids more than in those who received the placebo, the researchers reported...

"We are extremely pleased about these positive findings for donanemab as a potential therapy for people living with Alzheimer's disease, the only leading cause of death without a treatment that slows disease progression," Dr. Mark Mintun, Eli Lilly's vice president of pain and neurodegeneration, said in a January statement announcing the trial results...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, and currently affects 6.2 million Americans age 65 and older, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

"Tens of millions of doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca are sitting idly in American manufacturing facilities," reports the New York Times, "awaiting results from its U.S. clinical trial while countries that have authorized its use beg for access."

schwit1 shares their report: The fate of those doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine is the subject of an intense debate among White House and federal health officials, with some arguing the administration should let them go abroad where they are desperately needed while others are not ready to relinquish them, according to senior administration officials...

About 30 million doses are currently bottled at AstraZeneca's facility in West Chester, Ohio, which handles "fill-finish," the final phase of the manufacturing process during which the vaccine is placed in vials, one official with knowledge of the stockpile said. Emergent BioSolutions, a company in Maryland that AstraZeneca has contracted to manufacture its vaccine in the United States, has also produced enough vaccine in Baltimore for tens of millions more doses once it is filled into vials and packaged, the official said. But although AstraZeneca's vaccine is already authorized in more than 70 countries, according to a company spokesman, its U.S. clinical trial has not yet reported results, and the company has not applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization.

AstraZeneca has asked the Biden administration to let it loan American doses to the European Union, where it has fallen short of its original supply commitments and where the vaccination campaign has stumbled badly. The administration, for now, has denied the request, one official said...

Johnson & Johnson, which has authorization for its vaccine in the United States but fell behind on its production targets in both the United States and Europe, recently asked the United States to loan 10 million doses to the European Union, but the Biden administration also denied that request, according to American and European officials... The administration has focused on Johnson & Johnson's one-shot vaccine, brokering a deal to have the pharmaceutical giant Merck manufacture and bottle the shot and announcing plans to secure 100 million additional doses... Privately, two senior administration officials said that by helping Johnson & Johnson scale up with the Merck deal, the White House is laying the groundwork for the company to eventually make its vaccine available overseas.

The Washington Post reports: Tesla's Bay Area production plant recorded hundreds of covid-19 cases following CEO Elon Musk's defiant reopening of the plant in May, according to county-level data obtained by a legal transparency website.

The document, obtained by the website PlainSite following a court ruling this year, showed Tesla received around 10 reports of covid-19 in May when the plant reopened, and saw a steady rise in cases all the way up to 125 in December, as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus peaked around the country. The revelation follows The Washington Post's reporting in June that there had been multiple covid-19 cases reported at Tesla's facilities in Fremont, Calif., after Musk decided to reopen despite a countywide stay-at-home order, daring officials to arrest him. The data, covering the months between May and December, showed there were around 450 total reported cases. Roughly 10,000 people work at the plant...

Despite around 10 cases in May, according to the data, the health department told The Post in early June that there were no known cases of workplace infections affecting county residents. Tesla and the Alameda County Public Health Department and representatives did not respond to a request for comment...

Tesla also came under fire for its treatment of workers. It had promised they could remain home if they felt uncomfortable returning to the line. The Post reported in late June and July that workers concerned about covid exposure received termination notices after they did not return to work. The data released by Alameda County shows there were 19 reported cases in June and 58 reported cases at the plant in July.

Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, the world's fastest in terms of computing speed, went into full operation this week, earlier than initially scheduled, in the hope that it can be used for research related to the novel coronavirus. From a report: The supercomputer, named after an alternative word for Mount Fuji, became partially operational in April last year to visualize how droplets that could carry the virus spread from the mouth and to help explore possible treatments for COVID-19. "I hope Fugaku will be cherished by the people as it can do what its predecessor K couldn't, including artificial intelligence (applications) and big data analytics," said Hiroshi Matsumoto, president of the Riken research institute that developed the machine, in a ceremony held at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, where it is installed. Fugaku, which can perform over 442 quadrillion computations per second, was originally scheduled to start operating fully in the fiscal year from April. It will eventually be used in fields such as climate and artificial intelligence applications, and will be used in more than 100 projects, according to state-sponsored Riken.

YouTube has taken down more than 30,000 videos that made misleading or false claims about COVID-19 vaccines over the last six months. Axios reports: YouTube first started including vaccination misinformation in its COVID-19 medical misinformation policy in October 2020. Since February 2020, YouTube has taken down more than 800,000 videos containing coronavirus misinformation. The videos are first flagged by either the company's AI systems or human reviewers, then receive another level of review.

Videos that violate the vaccine policy, according to YouTube's rules, are those that contradict expert consensus on the vaccines from health authorities or the World Health Organization. Accounts that violate YouTube's rules are subject to a "strike" system, which can result in accounts being permanently banned. "Platforms are eager to share data about the volume of misinformation they catch, and that transparency is valuable," adds Axios. "But the most valuable data would tell us the extent of misinformation that isn't caught."

Russian intelligence agencies have mounted a campaign to undermine confidence in Pfizer's and other Western vaccines, using online publications that in recent months have questioned the vaccines' development and safety, U.S. officials said. From a report: An official with the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, identified four publications that he said have served as fronts for Russian intelligence. The websites played up the vaccines' risk of side effects, questioned their efficacy, and said the U.S. had rushed the Pfizer vaccine through the approval process, among other false or misleading claims. Though the outlets' readership is small, U.S. officials say they inject false narratives that can be amplified by other Russian and international media.

"We can say these outlets are directly linked to Russian intelligence services," the Global Engagement Center official said of the sites behind the disinformation campaign. "They're all foreign-owned, based outside of the United States. They vary a lot in their reach, their tone, their audience, but they're all part of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem." In addition, Russian state media and Russian government Twitter accounts have made overt efforts to raise concerns about the cost and safety of the Pfizer vaccine in what experts outside the U.S. government say is an effort to promote the sale of Russia's rival Sputnik V vaccine.

"The emphasis on denigrating Pfizer is likely due to its status as the first vaccine besides Sputnik V to see mass use, resulting in a greater potential threat to Sputnik's market dominance," says a forthcoming report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nongovernmental organization that focuses on the danger that authoritarian governments pose to democracies and that is part of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S. think tank. The foreign efforts to sow doubts about the vaccine exploit deep-seated anxieties about the efficacy and side effects of vaccines that were already prevalent in some communities in the U.S. and internationally. Concern about side effects is a major reason for vaccine hesitancy, according to U.S. Census Bureau data made public last month.

In late November, an urgent email popped up in the inbox of Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices, one of the world's largest syringe makers. It was from UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, and it was desperately seeking syringes. Not just any would do. These syringes must be smaller than usual. They had to break if used a second time, to prevent spreading disease through accidental recycling. Most important, UNICEF needed them in vast quantities. Now. From a report: "I thought, 'No issues,'" said Rajiv Nath, the company's managing director, who has sunk millions of dollars into preparing his syringe factories for the vaccination onslaught. "We could deliver it possibly faster than anybody else." As countries jostle to secure enough vaccine doses to put an end to the Covid-19 outbreak, a second scramble is unfolding for syringes. Vaccines aren't all that useful if health care professionals lack a way to inject them into people.

Officials in the United States and the European Union have said they don't have enough vaccine syringes. In January, Brazil restricted exports of syringes and needles when its vaccination effort fell short. Further complicating the rush, the syringes have to be the right type. Japan revealed last month that it might have to discard millions of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine if it couldn't secure enough special syringes that could draw out a sixth dose from its vials. In January, the Food and Drug Administration advised health care providers in the United States that they could extract more doses from the Pfizer vials after hospitals there discovered that some contained enough for a sixth -- or even a seventh -- person. "A lot of countries were caught flat-footed," said Ingrid Katz, the associate director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. "It seems like a fundamental irony that countries around the world have not been fully prepared to get these types of syringes." The world needs between eight billion and 10 billion syringes for Covid-19 vaccinations alone, experts say. In previous years, only 5 percent to 10 percent of the estimated 16 billion syringes used worldwide were meant for vaccination and immunization, said Prashant Yadav, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, and an expert on health care supply chains.

schwit1 writes: Americans who have received the full COVID-19 vaccine can gather with vaccinated grandparents or friends without wearing masks or keeping their distance, according to new CDC guidance announced Monday, and those grandparents can visit with and hug family members that aren't vaccinated as long as they don't have underlying medical conditions that put them at high risk for COVID-19. The new guidance also says that vaccinated individuals don't need to quarantine or get tested if they come in contact with someone positive for COVID-19 and don't have any symptoms.