CDC Panel Backs Moderna Vaccine For Children Ages 6-17, Study Shows Vaccines Saved About 20 Million Lives In First Year

The agency cleared the Moderna mRNA,
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Vaccine for adults in December 2020 but has given it longer consideration for a younger age group due to reports that it has been linked to heart problems in boys.

The news comes as a new model study found nearly 20 million lives were saved by COVID vaccines in their first year, and even more would have been saved had international vaccine targets been met, as reported by the Associated Press.

Imperial College London’s Oliver Watson, who led the new model study, said vaccines would prevent deaths on an unimaginable scale.

“Catastrophic would be the first word that comes to mind,” Watson said of the outcome if vaccines to fight the coronavirus had not been available. The results, he said, “quantify how much worse the pandemic could have been if we hadn’t had these vaccines.”

Also read: dr Fauci’s COVID case was “mild,” thanks to vaccination and double boosters, he says

Researchers used data from 185 countries to estimate vaccines prevented 4.2 million COVID deaths in India, 1.9 million in the United States, 1 million in Brazil, 631,000 in France and 507,000 in the Kingdom.

According to the study, published Thursday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, 600,000 additional deaths would have been avoided if the World Health Organization’s target of 40 percent immunization coverage by the end of 2021 had been met.

The key finding – that 19.8 million COVID-19 deaths have been averted – is based on estimates of how many more than usual deaths have occurred during that period. Using only reported COVID-19 deaths and not excess mortality data, the same model yielded 14.4 million vaccine-prevented deaths.

Scientists in London ruled out China due to uncertainty about the pandemic’s impact on deaths there and its huge population.

The study has other limitations. The researchers did not include how the virus might have mutated differently in the absence of a vaccine. And they haven’t considered how lockdowns or mask-wearing would have changed if vaccines hadn’t been available.

Another modeling group used a different approach to estimate that 16.3 million COVID-19 deaths were averted by vaccines. This work, conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, has not been published.

See now: dr Fauci’s COVID case was “mild,” thanks to vaccination and double boosters, he says

Cases in the United States are currently averaging 99,594 per day, down 9% from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times tracker. The number of daily cases remained stable throughout June, although there are concerns that the real number could be higher as most people test at home and data is generally not collected.

The number of cases also varies geographically, with the northern and midwestern states, which were recent hotspots, now seeing a decline while the south and west are increasing at a faster rate. In Mississippi, for example, cases have more than doubled since early June.

The country is seeing an average of 30,726 hospital admissions per day, up 5% from two weeks ago. The average daily death toll is 327, down 5% from two weeks ago.

Coronavirus update: CNET’s Daily Roundup curates and reports each weekday on the latest developments since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Other COVID-19 news you should know:

• The lack of clear, concise, and consistent messaging about the seriousness of the novel coronavirus in the first few months of its spread created a false sense of security in Americans that the pandemic would not be serious and prompted early inaction by the entire federal government. That was the assessment of Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as COVID response coordinator under then-President Donald Trump and testified for the first time before a House panel on Thursday about her service in the Trump administration, the AP reported. “It wasn’t just the president, a lot of our leaders used words like ‘we could contain,’ and you can’t contain a virus that can’t be seen,” Birx said. “And it wasn’t seen because we didn’t test.”

• Germany will begin charging for rapid COVID-19 tests that were previously free, although vulnerable groups will be exempt from the fee, the AP reported. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach announced the news on Friday, saying it would start on July 1, with citizens paying 3 euros ($3.16) each, with the rest to be covered by a government subsidy.

• Yelp Inc. YELP,
+3.32%
P announced on Thursday it would be closing its offices in three major U.S. cities, saying “the future of work at Yelp is a long way off” after employees worked from home en masse early in the pandemic. In a blog post, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the online rating company would be closing its “most consistently busy offices” in New York, Chicago and Washington, DC, effective July 29. “Taken together, the three offices we are closing have an average weekly occupancy rate of less than 2% of available workspaces,” he said. A survey found that 86% of respondents prefer to work from home.

• A city in central China has fired one of its top security officials and fined several others for using a COVID-tracking system to thwart protests over alleged bank fraud, the Wall Street Journal reported. Two pandemic control officials in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou have changed the health codes of more than a thousand bank customers to red — indicating high risk from COVID infections — “without permission,” the city’s anti-corruption agency said in a statement.

Also read: Immune-compromised COVID patients should be treated as a matter of priority to prevent emergence of new variants, experts say

Here’s what the numbers say

The global number of confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 542.2 million as of Friday, while the death toll topped 6.32 million, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The United States leads the world with 86.8 million cases and 1,015,343 deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracker shows that 222.1 million people in the United States are fully vaccinated, or 66.9% of the total population. But only 105 million had a first booster shot, or 47.3% of the vaccinated population.

Only 16.6 million people aged 50 and over who were eligible for a second booster shot had one, or 26.1% of those who had received a first booster shot.