Medical groups' calls for COVID-19 vaccination mandates for healthcare workers reached a fever pitch on Monday, with the American Medical Association (AMA), American Nurses Association, and 55 other organizations joining the chorus supporting mandatory vaccination.
"It is critical that all people in the healthcare workforce get vaccinated against COVID-19 for the safety of our patients and our colleagues," said Susan R. Bailey, MD,...
With some health care workers still refusing to be immunized, medical centers around the country are requiring shots as cases climb once again.
More and more hospitals and major health systems are requiring employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine, citing rising caseloads fueled by the Delta variant and stubbornly low vaccination rates in their communities and even within their work force.
Many hospitals say their efforts to immunize...
Brandon Will had a life plan: go to grad school for creative writing in New York City and eventually get a job in publishing. But then his mother, Janice, came to visit. She had lost a “startling” amount of weight, he said. At 62, she wanted to take cabs for short distances. He noticed a stiffness in her facial muscles that made it difficult for her to express emotion. “I’d be taking selfies and she couldn’t...
A coalition of medical organizations on Tuesday called on health care facilities to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for employees.
"Prior experience and current information suggest that a sufficient vaccination rate is unlikely to be achieved without making COVID-19 vaccination a condition of employment," the statement from the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America...
The highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for more than half of all new coronavirus infections in the United States, new government data shows.
The dangerous variant that crippled India recently currently makes up 51.7% of new infections in this country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . At the same time, the Alpha variant, which first surfaced in Britain and dominated infections...
A novel SARS-CoV-2 variant, the delta plus variant, has been identified in over 10 countries. Health authorities are raising concerns that the variant may have an increased ability to transmit, but they also note that this variant’s transmissibility is likely similar to that of the preexisting delta variant.
As ever more SARS-CoV-2 variants emerge, governments and public health experts continue to consider the...
President Joe Biden celebrated the second July Fourth holiday of the coronavirus pandemic by declaring that “America is coming back together.”.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Calling a vaccination “the most patriotic thing you can do,” President Joe Biden on Sunday mixed the nation’s birthday party with a celebration of freedom from the worst of the pandemic. He tempered the strides against COVID-19 with a...
The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are out of step in their COVID-19 mask guidance, prompting confusion.
In light of sky-rocketing cases of the COVID-19 Delta variant around the globe, last week the WHO called for all vaccinated people to continue to wear masks.
The CDC, however, has not followed suit. The U.S. agency still sticks by its guidance -- announced in May -- for...
There appears to be a correlation between high concentrations of airborne pollen and high rates of infection with SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19.
A new computer model suggests that tree pollen could facilitate the transmission of the virus in a crowd of people gathered outdoors.
The model assumes that the virus can hitch a ride on pollen grains, though there is currently no direct evidence that this can...
The U.S. needs another innovation dream team.
O n june 14, 1940, the day the German army invaded and occupied Paris, a small group of scientists marched to the White House with grave news for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. U.S. military technology, they said, was utterly unprepared to take on the Axis powers. They urged the president to create a new agency—a dream team of techies and scientists—to help win the war....
A study led by Fernando Colchero, University of Southern Denmark and Susan Alberts, Duke University, North Carolina, that included researchers from 42 institutions across 14 countries, provides new insights into the aging theory "the invariant rate of ageing hypothesis," which states that every species has a relatively fixed rate of aging.
"Human death is inevitable. No matter how many vitamins we take, how healthy our environment is or...
The next big plague is coming, and despite making progress on pandemic preparedness, the U.S. might still suffer mass casualties. Here’s why.
Ominous pathogens seem to arrive every few years: SARS in 2003, swine flu in 2009, Ebola in 2014 , Zika in 2016 , COVID-19 in 2019 . The World Health Organization calls these viral threats “ Disease X ,” both to encourage policy makers to think...