Adult Vaccinations

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Mainers are mulling whether to toss aside a law that eliminates most exemptions for childhood vaccinations against the backdrop of a global rush to contain a virus for which there is no vaccine. Some voters say the COVID-19 virus that’s spreading — and the rush to develop a vaccine — could cause undecided Mainers to err on the side of keeping the stricter vaccine law, which eliminates philosophical and religious exemptions. “It brings it home and into reality for those who may be on the fence,” said Brandon Mazer, of Portland, who supports the law. The People’s Veto referendum on Tuesday would undo the law that ends nonmedical vaccine opt-outs by September 2021 at public and private schools and universities, including nursery schools. It’s part of a trend of states tightening rules on vaccines in response to growing numbers of unvaccinated children. Advertisement Referendum supporters say philosophical and religious exemptions must be restored because paren...

With horse trail riding and show season right around the corner, it’s time to get horses updated on vaccinations for this year. A Coggins and Vaccination clinic will be held from 11 a.m. - 1 p.m., Saturday, March 7, at 1303 Old Allensville Road. Dr. John Seal, of Seal Equine Mobile Veterinarian Service, will be available on site. No appointment is required. Vaccinations for dogs and cats will also be available, although pet owners are asked to keep dogs on a leash and cats in carriers. The prices for the 2020 Coggins clinic are range from $15 for a tetanus vaccination to $50 for the EWT/WN combination vaccine. Other vaccinations available include the Strangles vaccine for $24; West Nile, Botulism and Flu vaccinations for $30. Coggins tests are available for $32. For more information call 336-503-7183.

Getty Images An estimated 94% of new vaccine trials end in failure, according to one study. If a vaccine for coronavirus is developed there is no guarantee that every American will be able to afford it, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told lawmakers earlier this week. However, other health experts say that won’t be the case if the government pays for the development of a vaccine. “We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” Azar said before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. “The priority is to get vaccines and therapeutics and price controls won’t get us there.” Unlike European Union countries, the U.S. government does not have the ability to dictate what private manufacturers can charge for a new vaccine. Until third-party competition from another company is established, a private company can demand high prices for a new vaccine. That said, it can cos...

Few members of the General Assembly's Public Health Committee seemed to want to talk back to the vaccination opponents who shouted, screeched, and chanted at them this week as the committee approved a bill to repeal the religious exemption for vaccination of public school students. But the 14 committee members who approved the bill, all Democrats, were courageous all the same, while two Democrats and nine Republicans, voting against the bill, hid behind a bogus procedural objection -- that the committee was moving too fast -- as if the issue was not fully discussed at this week's hearing and had not been fully discussed during last year's legislative session and as if anyone has said anything new about it since. The bill contains what would be a good political compromise if the anti-vaxxers were in a compromising mood. That is, the bill lets students already claiming the religious exemption to remain exempt. While some anti-vaxxers screamed that legislators had not liste...

DENVER (CBS4) – A bill that supporters claim will improve vaccination rates in Colorado has advanced to the state House. The state Senate approved the measure on Friday. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images) Among the provisions: requiring schools to notify parents of school immunization rates and requiring parents who want to opt out get a state-issued form signed by an immunizing provider or complete an online vaccine education class.

Public concern is rising that the high costs in parts of the US's healthcare system could form a barrier that discourages people from getting treatment for the novel coronavirus . But one layer of the healthcare system could help Americans save a lot of money on a coronavirus vaccine: Obamacare. Under a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act, health insurers must cover federally recommended vaccines at no cost for patients. The ACA has the potential to form a critical pillar in a federal strategy to combat the spread of a fast-moving coronavirus. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories . The coronavirus is spreading around the world and scores of new cases are diagnosed daily, as the disease breaks far beyond its point of origin in Wuhan, China. There are at least 63 confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States. But that figure is still significantly fewer compared to other nations. Europe has seen a surge of new infections in recent days, br...

T he advertisements plastered across city bus stops and flooding television airwaves across Maine make a simple plea to voters: “Reject Big Pharma” by voting yes on a state-wide initiative. But the referendum that Maine voters will decide on Tuesday, known as Question 1, has little to do with drug prices. Instead, approval would overturn a 2019 law that requires all schoolchildren to receive vaccinations unless granted an exemption by a doctor. The advertisements, meanwhile, are funded in large part not by drug pricing activists but by a nationwide network of anti-vaccine groups. The media blitz marks a new effort by anti-vaccine activists to win new adherents, and to do so by co-opting public anger toward pharmaceutical companies — not just over exorbitant drug prices but because of the industry’s role in the opioid crisis, which has hit Maine hard. advertisement If the effort to overturn the mandate is successful, public health advocates fear the momentum could bleed across stat...

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John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack University Medical Center said Friday that it is the only site in New Jersey, and one of just 17 in the country, participating in a multicenter international Phase II study of an innovative personalized cancer vaccine being evaluated in combination with pembrolizumab immunotherapy in patients with melanoma that has been surgically removed but has a high risk of coming back. The expectation is that the vaccine can prime a patient’s immune system to be more responsive to immunotherapy and reduce the risk of cancer recurrence. Utilizing a novel and potentially revolutionary gene-based technology, the vaccine is created by comparing the patient’s normal cell DNA sequence to that of their tumor and identifying tumor-specific changes to the DNA. Once identified, the patient-specific, tumor-specific changes are turned into a messenger RNA construct to be used as a vaccine. Pembrolizumab belongs to a class of drugs called “checkpoint inhibitors,” ...

Kanık Yüksek S, Tezer H, Özkaya Parlakay A, Gülhan B, Kara A, Çiftçi E, Tapısız A, Çelik M, Özdemir H, Aykaç K, Demirdağ TB, Tural Kara T, Hayran G, İnce E. Impact of the mandatory Hepatitis A immunization program: before and after the vaccine in Ankara, Central of Turkey. Turk J Pediatr 2019; 61: 677-685. In Turkey Hepatitis A virus (HAV) infection is considered to be moderateendemic. Hepatitis A vaccine was included in the mandatory vaccination schedule of Turkey on November 2012. We aimed to evaluate the cases of HAV infection followed in Ankara, which is located in the center of Central Anatolia, retrospectively according to the date of the administration of the mandatory hepatitis A vaccine. A total of 272 children followed-up between January 2008 and December 2015 for HAV infection in five separate hospitals were enrolled to the study. There were 200 (68.2%) cases in the pre-vaccination group, 72 (31.74%) cases in the post-vaccination group, and 55.1% were male in total. The immu...

Rome Memorial Hospital, along with the state and Oneida County Health Departments, has scheduled walk-in vaccination clinics for people who may have been exposed to the hepatitis A virus to supplement the clinics scheduled by the county. Individuals who ate at Cianfrocco’s Subs & Wings in Rome between Monday, Feb. 3 and Saturday, Feb. 22 were potentially exposed to Hepatitis A by an employee who tested positive for the virus. No cases of the illness have been linked to the restaurant, but public health authorities notified the public as a precaution. Those who were exposed must receive the vaccination for preventive treatment within 14 days of exposure to be effective. Anyone who doesn’t receive the post exposure vaccine within the 14 day window should monitor themselves for symptoms. The free walk-in clinics will be held at Chestnut Commons, 107 E. Chestnut St., Rome, in Suite 103, while the vaccine supply is available at the following times: Today, Friday, Feb. 28, 3 to 7 p.m...

S tate lawmakers could make Illinois the sixth state to remove a religious or philosophical objection to vaccines required to attend school. In Illinois and most other states, it’s required by law that children be up to date on their vaccination schedule to attend school. As of January, 45 states and Washington D.C allowed religious exemptions for immunizations and 15 of those allowed for philosophical exemptions, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. If lawmakers approve of Senate Bill 3668 and it’s signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, parents would no longer be able to submit a letter to their child’s school objecting to the vaccination requirement. Supporters of removing the exemption have said some parents have used it improperly. “Back in 2014, we had about 14,000 religious exemptions,” said Tom Hughes, director of the Illinois Public Health Association. “In 2018, it’s up to over 19,000.” This increase came even after public health officials increased the step...

Scientists and drug companies are racing to develop and test treatments and vaccines that address COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Work on both is progressing at an unprecedented speed — but researchers are starting essentially from scratch on vaccine development, so the process is going to take a long time. Treatments, on the other hand, were further along when the outbreak started and might be available sooner. “They’re in vastly different situations right now,” says Florian Krammer, a professor and vaccine development expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Both treatments and vaccines are important for a robust and effective response to the outbreak. Treatments help people after they already have a disease; in the case of COVID-19, researchers hope to treat the around 15 percent of COVID-19 patients who have non-mild symptoms. Vaccines, on the other hand, help prevent people from getting sick in the first place. Scientists started work on dr...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] CASPCA to hold March vaccination walk-in clinic -    CBS19 News

Rome Memorial Hospital, along with the state and Oneida County Health Departments, has scheduled walk-in vaccination clinics for people who may have been exposed to the hepatitis A virus to supplement the clinics scheduled by the county. Individuals who ate at Cianfrocco’s Subs & Wings in Rome between Monday, Feb. 3 and Saturday, Feb. 22 were potentially exposed to Hepatitis A by an employee who tested positive for the virus. No cases of the illness have been linked to the restaurant, but public health authorities notified the public as a precaution. Those who were exposed must receive the vaccination for preventive treatment within 14 days of exposure to be effective. Anyone who doesn’t receive the post exposure vaccine within the 14 day window should monitor themselves for symptoms. The free walk-in clinics will be held at Chestnut Commons, 107 E. Chestnut St., Rome, in Suite 103, while the vaccine supply is available at the following times: Today, Friday, Feb. 28, 3 to 7 p.m...

Amid fears of a looming pandemic, scientists in the US and across the globe are scrambling to develop vaccines – including in Israel, where one group of researchers says it could be ready in just three weeks and available for use within 90 days. The scientists at the Galilee Research Institute, known as MIGAL, are adapting its vaccine against the avian coronavirus infectious bronchitis virus, or IBV, to work for the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19, the Jerusalem Post reported . “Congratulations to MIGAL on this exciting breakthrough. I am confident that there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” said Ofir Akunis, Israel’s minister of science and technology. The independent research institute, which specializes in the fields of biotechnology, environmental sciences and agriculture, says on its website that its team “includes 80 PhDs and a total of 260 researchers” at 53 labs. Its vaccine for IBV, a bronchi...

Influenza vaccination was not associated with an increased risk of developing immune-related adverse events (irAEs) in a real-world population of patients with cancer receiving pembrolizumab, according to results of a retrospective study published in JCO Oncology Practice . Results of studies investigating the impact of influenza vaccination on the incidence of irAEs in patients with cancer treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have been conflicting. This retrospective study identified adult patients with cancer treated at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who received at least 1 dose of the programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) inhibitor pembrolizumab between September 2014 and August 2017. Corresponding demographic and clinical data were extracted from patient medical records. The main criterion for assigning patients to the influenza vaccinated group was receipt of the influenza vaccine within 30 days of starting pembrolizumab or during pembrolizumab therapy. All oth...

The rapid spread of coronavirus is beginning to look a lot like a pandemic , and besides its often deadly effects on human health, it’s also having a serious effect on the global economy , raising the prospect that everyday life could be disrupted all over the world. But anti-vaccine corners of the internet are worried about something else: that the government might develop—or even “enforce”—a coronavirus vaccine. For most people, the news that a vaccine had been developed against the disease would come as a relief, but for anti-vaxxers it ties together two things. The first is, naturally, an overwhelming fear and distrust of vaccines; the second is a terrified certainty that some day the government will find a convenient excuse to enforce Orwellian degrees of control. This is a common theme in the anti-vax world, and conspiracy theorist communities more broadly: that every disease outbreak is a pretext to enforce a secret, frequently sinister agenda. (Conspiracy theorists of all str...

A recent surge in mumps among young adults in the UK has been linked to the 1998 MMR vaccine scare, when a now-discredited medical paper authored by Andrew Wakefield suggested a connection between the vaccine and the development of autism. The publication of the paper led many parents to refuse the vaccine for their child. The effect of Wakefield’s paper is still deeply felt. Indeed, every week seems to bring news of an unfolding controversy about vaccination. In the UK an alarming decline in childhood vaccination rates has been recorded. Vaccine scepticism seems to be increasing — a fitting testament to these troubling times, when distrust of science and expertise permeate. Social media is often pinpointed as part of the problem. The ease with which ideas and information about vaccination are spread on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms is causing concern. As one medical journalist observed in 2019: “Lies spread through social media have helped demonise one of the safest ...