Month: February 2022

Enlarge / A child getting a vaccination on February 19, 2021, in Bonn, Germany. Covid-19 Coverage View more stories The Food and Drug Administration may be reconsidering its criteria for authorizing COVID-19 vaccine doses for children under age five, according to Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and a current board member of vaccine-maker Pfizer. This opens the possibility that vaccine-ineligible youngsters could get protection from severe COVID-19 sooner than anticipated. In an interview Sunday, Dr. Gottlieb told CBS's Face the Nation that he sensed a shift in federal health officials' thinking on the younger group. "And I'm hopeful that you could see some movement on trying to entertain that application earlier," he said. "Ultimately...

The first case of the BA.2 omicron subvariant, often called "stealth omicron," has been detected in Illinois, Northwestern University officials said Monday. The case was discovered by Northwestern Medicine’s Center for Pathogen Genomics and Microbial Evolution (CPGME) over the weekend, according to a news release from university officials. The individual who contracted the variant was tested for COVID-19 on Jan. 18, however additional information about the person, including where in Illinois they're located, wasn't available. It isn't the first case to be detected in the Midwest as a Milwaukee County health official said Monday the subvariant had also been reported in Wisconsin. Scientists with Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine say the subvariant's ar...