Moderna said on Tuesday that its coronavirus vaccine, authorized only for use in adults, was powerfully effective in 12- to 17-year-olds, and that it planned to apply to the Food and Drug Administration in June for authorization to use the vaccine in adolescents.
If approved, its vaccine would become the second Covid-19 vaccine available to U.S. adolescents. Federal regulators authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this month for 12- to 15-year-olds.
The Pfizer shot was initially authorized for use in people 16 and older, while Moderna’s has been available for those 18 and up.
Proof of the vaccines’ efficacy and safety for adolescents is helping school officials and other leaders as they plan for the fall. On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that all public school students in New York City, the largest school system in the United States, would return to in-person learning in the fall.
New York’s move comes as several states have indicated that they will restrict remote learning, including Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
The Moderna results, which the company announced in a statement, are based on a clinical trial that enrolled 3,732 people ages 12 to 17, two-thirds of whom received two vaccine doses. There were no cases of symptomatic Covid-19 in fully vaccinated adolescents, the company reported. That translates to an efficacy of 100 percent, the same figure that Pfizer and BioNTech reported in a trial of their vaccine in 12- to 15-year-olds.
“These look like promising results,” said Dr. Kristin Oliver, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “The more vaccines we have to protect adolescents from Covid, the better.”
Moderna also reported that a single dose of its vaccine had 93 percent efficacy against symptomatic disease.
“Those cases that did occur between the two doses were mild, which is also a good indicator of protection against disease,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, said in an email.
The side effects were consistent with what has been reported in adults: pain at the site of the injection, headache, fatigue, muscle pain and chills. “No significant safety concerns have been identified to date,” the company said.
The adolescents in the study will be monitored for a year after their second dose.
The results were announced in a news release that did not contain detailed data from the clinical trial. And Dr. Angela Rasmussen, virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, said that the vaccines’ efficacy can be trickier to evaluate in children, who are less likely to develop symptomatic disease than adults.
Nevertheless, she said, the results are in line with what scientists expected and suggest “that adolescents respond to the vaccine comparably to adults who receive it.”
Moderna said it planned to submit the data for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
A new and potentially more contagious variant of the coronavirus has begun to outpace other versions of the virus in Britain, putting pressure on the government to shorten people’s wait for second doses of vaccines and illustrating the risks of a faltering global immunization drive.
The new variant, which has become dominant in India since first being detected there in December, may be responsible in part for a virus wave across South Asia.
Efforts to understand the variant picked up once it began spreading in Britain, one of at least 49 countries where it is present. Scientists there are sequencing half of all coronavirus cases.
The preliminary results out of Britain, drawn from a few thousand cases of the variant, contained both good and bad news, scientists said.
The variant, known by evolutionary biologists as B.1.617.2, is “highly likely” to be more transmissible than the variant behind Britain’s devastating wintertime surge, government scientists have said.
Helpfully for Britain and other wealthy nations, the variant has emerged at a less dire moment of the pandemic. More than four out of every five people in England above age 65 have been given both doses of a coronavirus vaccine, driving down hospitalizations and deaths.
And a new study by Public Health England offered reassuring signs that fully vaccinated people were well protected from the variant.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offered 88 percent protection against the variant first sampled in India, only a slight drop from the 93 percent protection given against the variant from Britain, Public Health England said. The AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine was 60 percent effective against the variant from India, compared with 66 percent against the one first seen in Britain.
Because people in Britain started receiving AstraZeneca’s vaccine later than Pfizer’s, they have been followed for a shorter period, meaning that the effectiveness figures for that vaccine may underestimate the true numbers, scientists said. Other studies in England have shown little to no difference between the effectiveness of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.
For now, a rise in cases of the variant from India has not caused an overall surge in the virus in Britain. And not all scientists are convinced that the variant is as contagious as feared. The true test will be whether it surges in other countries, especially those — unlike Britain — that are grappling with high case counts of other variants, Andrew Rambaut, a professor of molecular evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, wrote on Twitter.
In Britain, part of its rapid growth may have to do with the particular places it was first introduced. Bolton, in northwestern England, where the new variant is most advanced, is a highly deprived area with tightly packed housing that could be hastening its spread, scientists said.
Local officials in eight areas of the country where the variant has been found to be spreading criticized the government on Tuesday for not doing more to publicize new, stricter guidelines on social distancing in those areas. The recommendations, which are not legally binding, also discourage travel into and out of the areas, which include towns in north and central England.
Local lawmakers said many residents were unaware of the new guidance, which comes ahead of a holiday weekend during which people would typically travel domestically.
Vaccine passports will not be at play in the state of Alabama.
On Monday, the state’s governor, Kay Ivey, signed into law legislation that bans government institutions, along with schools and private businesses, from refusing goods, services or admission to people because of their immunization status.
The law, which goes into immediate effect, says that state and local governments “may not issue vaccine or immunization passports, vaccine or immunization passes or any other standardized documentation for the purpose of certifying the immunization status of an individual.”
Under the law, educational institutions can still require students to prove their vaccination status, but only for specific vaccines that were required as of Jan. 1 and if the institution gives “an exemption for students with a medical condition or religious belief that is contrary to vaccination.”
More than 400 college campuses are requiring students to be inoculated with a Covid-19 vaccine before enrolling this fall semester, with most of the mandates coming from states that voted for President Biden.
In a statement on Monday, Ms. Ivey said that although she had received the coronavirus vaccine and was “glad for the peace of mind it brings,” people should not be required to be inoculated.
“I am supportive of a voluntary vaccine, and by signing this bill into law, I am only further solidifying that conviction,” Ms. Ivey wrote.
In the United States, vaccine passports are not mandatory but allow people to easily prove that they are vaccinated. The passports have become a cultural flash point as the shots become more accessible. In Alabama, almost 29 percent of the state’s population is fully vaccinated, about 10 percent less than the U.S. average, as of Monday, according to a New York Times database.
Republican governors in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Montana and Texas have denounced the use of vaccine passports and have issued executive orders similar to Alabama’s new law.
In March, New York State introduced the Excelsior Pass, a digital version of a vaccine passport, which allows residents to show businesses and venues that they have proof of vaccination or that they have received a negative virus test.
At the federal level, the Biden administration has said the government will not issue a digital system that tracks people’s coronavirus vaccination status.
“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in April. “There will be no federal vaccinations database and no federal mandate requiring everyone to obtain a single vaccination credential.”
Children who get sick from the rare but serious Covid-related inflammatory syndrome may surmount their most significant symptoms within six months, but they may still have muscle weakness and emotional difficulties at that time, a new small study suggests.
Published in the journal Lancet Child and Adolescent Health on Monday, the study appears to be the first detailed look at the health status of children six months after they were hospitalized with the condition, called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children or MIS-C. The syndrome typically emerges two weeks to six weeks after a coronavirus infection, often quite a mild one. MIS-C can result in hospitalizations for children with severe symptoms involving the heart and several other organs.
A major question has been whether children who survive MIS-C will end up with lasting organ damage or other health problems. The new study, which looked at 46 children under 18 who were admitted to a London hospital for MIS-C (it has a different name and abbreviation, PIMS-TS, in Britain), suggests that many of the most serious problems can resolve with time.
“To be honest, I think we all didn’t know what to expect,” said Dr. Justin Penner, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the hospital involved in the study, Great Ormond Street Hospital. “We didn’t know which body systems would require assistance or become a problem one month, three months, six months down the line.”
The children in the study were hospitalized between April 4 and Sept. 1, 2020, part of the first wave of the inflammatory syndrome. They all had systemic inflammation, and most had symptoms involving multiple organ systems, such as the heart, kidneys or circulatory system. Forty-five had gastrointestinal symptoms, and 24 had neurological symptoms like confusion, memory problems, hallucinations, headaches or problems with balance or muscle control.
Sixteen of the children were placed on ventilators, 22 needed medication to help their hearts pump more effectively and 40 were treated with immunotherapies like intravenous immunoglobulin. All survived.
Six months after they were discharged from the hospital, one child still had systemic inflammation, two had heart abnormalities and six had gastrointestinal symptoms. All but one were able to resume school, either virtually or in person.
Still, 18 were experiencing muscle weakness and fatigue, scoring in the bottom 3 percent for their age and sex on the six-minute walking test, a standard test of endurance and aerobic capacity. And 15 were experiencing emotional difficulties like anxiety or severe mood changes, according to questionnaires answered by either the parents or the children.
GLOBAL ROUNDUP
The State Department on Monday warned Americans against traveling to Japan as the country experiences an increase in coronavirus cases less than two months before the start of the Tokyo Olympics.
The move has little practical effect, as Japan’s borders have been closed to most nonresident foreigners since the early months of the pandemic. But the warning is another blow for the Olympics, which are facing stiff opposition among the Japanese public over concerns that they could become a superspreader event as athletes and their entourages pour in from around the world.
The Japanese authorities have insisted that they can carry off the Olympics safely, and the State Department declaration is unlikely to affect the United States’ decision to send its athletes to the Olympics, whose organizers are not requiring participants to be inoculated.
The United States added Japan to a list of dozens of nations that have received its highest-level travel warning — “do not travel” — after the country’s virus incidence rate rose to a threshold that triggers such a declaration.
Starting in late April, large parts of the country entered a state of emergency as more contagious variants of the virus drove a rapid increase in case numbers. Although the numbers in Japan are low by global standards — averaging about 4,800 new cases daily, according to a New York Times database — fewer than 5 percent of residents have received a first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, putting Japan last among major developed nations in its vaccination campaign.
In other news around the world:
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In Australia, the authorities in Melbourne are racing to contain a coronavirus outbreak after four people tested positive on Monday and another five on Tuesday. The outbreak, the first in Victoria State in three months, is believed to stem from a man who was infectious in the state in early May. Officials announced new restrictions on indoor gatherings and renewed pleas for Australians to get inoculated. So far, 3.6 million vaccine doses have been given in Australia, which has a population of 26 million. In response to the new cases, New Zealand said it would pause travel to and from Victoria for three days.
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Health experts in Hong Kong are urging residents to be inoculated before millions of doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine expire within roughly three months. Less than one-fifth of the city’s 7.5 million people have received a dose amid mistrust of the government, fears over side effects and a lack of urgency as the Chinese territory records few new infections. Thomas Tsang, an adviser to the government’s vaccine task force, said on a radio program on Monday, “What we have is probably all we have for the rest of the year.”
The authorities in southern India are investigating a couple who are reported to have chartered a plane and performed a marriage ritual in midair in front of scores of guests, a breach of Covid-19 guidelines in a country that is being devastated by a second wave of the coronavirus.
The couple had intended to tie the knot in front of family and friends at a hotel in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, but coronavirus restrictions capped the guest list at 50 people.
Instead, according to reports in the Indian news media, the couple chartered a commercial aircraft operated by SpiceJet, an Indian carrier, and boarded the plane on Sunday morning along with about 160 people. The flight traveled from Madurai in Tamil Nadu to the city of Bangalore, a journey of more than an hour.
Family members of the couple, whom the authorities have not named, told the airline that they had already gotten married and were taking their guests on a postnuptial joy ride.
As the aircraft flew over the Meenakshi Amman Temple, spread over about 14 acres on the southern bank of Madurai, the bride and groom stood along with other passengers. A video shared on social media showed the groom placing a traditional ornament around the bride’s neck while passengers cheered and took photos.
The bride wore flowers and jewelry, traditional wedding attire for Hindus, while the groom wore customary southern Indian clothes. Guests were pictured maskless and crowded close together on the nearly packed flight.
A SpiceJet spokesperson said that the airline had informed the passengers about pandemic guidelines, including requirements that they wear masks and refrain from photography onboard.
“The agent and the guest passengers were briefed in detail, both in writing as well as verbally, on social distancing and safety norms to be followed as per Covid guidelines both at the airport and onboard the aircraft throughout the journey.,” the airline said in a statement.
India on Tuesday reported more than 196,000 new cases and 3,511 deaths from the virus, a slight decline from the global highs of recent weeks. For the 12th consecutive day, the number of people recovering from the virus outnumbered new infections, according to national data, although experts believe that India’s tallies of infections and deaths are significantly lower than the true toll.
Tamil Nadu has India’s fourth-highest coronavirus caseload. The state is averaging 34,000 new cases daily, and recorded 422 deaths from the virus on Monday.
More than 12.6 million United States households adopted animals from March to December of last year, according to the American Pet Products Association, helping to propel an increase in visits and revenue to veterinary offices.
That heightened demand has drawn investors and others to the market for veterinary services. Landlords who might have spurned tenants associated with unpleasant odors and noise are more amenable to leasing to the clinics after a year when the vets paid their rent while other businesses fell behind. And architecture firms that specialize in the design of vet space are busier than ever.
Tech-savvy start-ups are promising a reinvention of the experience, with phone apps, round-the-clock telemedicine and boutique storefronts with refreshments (for pet owners).
The pet care business is riding a growth spurt: Morgan Stanley projected that it would be a $275 billion industry in 2030, up from $100 billion in 2019, with vet care the fastest-growing segment over the next decade.
“Ten years ago, there was a baby boom,” Arash Danialifar, the chief executive of GD Realty Group, a California company that has leased space to a veterinary start-up, said about the proliferation of shops selling children’s fashion. “Now, it’s all about pets.”
On the glassy blue waters surrounding the U.S. Virgin Islands, catamarans and pleasure yachts have packed the shoreline for the past year — a scene so busy and crowded that it would have been notable even before the pandemic.
The business of charter yachts is booming, and is expected to pump at least $88 million into the local economy this season, almost double the figure from 2019, according to Marketplace Excellence, which represents the U.S. territory’s department of tourism.
Less than 12 miles away, the quiet waterways of the British Virgin Islands present a different story. Relatively few boats have harbored there since last spring, when Britain mostly shuttered the territory to international tourists. Strict Covid safety protocols have kept many away.
Before the pandemic, the Caribbean was the world’s most tourism-reliant region, according to recent calculations by the World Travel Tourism Council. Made up of dozens of sovereign nations, territories and dependencies that often reacted disparately to the virus, the region was struck unequally by the coronavirus.
Some islands were walloped by staggering caseloads, while infections on others sometimes dwindled to single digits.
Health care infrastructure across the region is limited, and many islands have endured border closures and stringent curfews. The result: Tourism has drastically declined, sinking the region’s economic output 58 percent last year.
For much of the coronavirus pandemic, Taiwan was a sanctuary for performing artists: A rare place that was almost Covid-free, where audiences could attend live dance festivals, full-fledged theater productions and classical music recitals in person.
But a recent surge in cases — Taiwan’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic — has brought a halt to cultural life on the self-governing island, forcing performing arts centers, concert halls and museums to shut their doors, just when those kinds of facilities are starting to come back to life in many other countries. .
Taiwan’s experience is a reminder of the continuing uncertainty of life in the pandemic, the threat posed by the virus and its power to upset even the most carefully crafted of plans. Semi-staged performances of Verdi’s “Falstaff” have been called off. The French musical “Notre Dame de Paris” has been postponed.
“Everything blew up,” said the American clarinetist Charles Neidich, who recently made the 7,781-mile trip to Taipei from New York, only to have his first live performance in more than 400 days canceled.
Though the number of cases in Taiwan is low compared with many parts of the world — 283 new cases were reported on Tuesday, fewer than in New York City — the island’s authorities are doubling down on restrictions, hoping that lockdowns can bring the virus under control within weeks or months while Taiwan tries to speed up its lumbering vaccination program.
Taiwan’s closing of its borders early in the pandemic and its strict public health measures, including mask mandates and extensive contact tracing, turned the island of 23.5 million into a coronavirus success story. But the emergence of more contagious variants in recent months, a relaxation of quarantine rules and a vaccine shortage gave the virus an opening.
The government has provided tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to arts groups during the pandemic, but some performers say the grants have not been enough to offset losses. Officials say restrictions on large gatherings are necessary to curb the rising rate of infections.
Performers from Taiwan and abroad have been caught in the middle, grappling with lost income and an avalanche of canceled engagements. But many artists are optimistic that concerts, dances, plays and museum exhibitions will soon return.
