My comment is that the parents with their pearl clutching will make a stink about it..... I already see it popping up on the message boards.
Rutgers ain’t got no time for that nonsense. They got plenty of applicants and limited spots. Besides the kids know all that stuff is nonsense anyway.
Well Rutgers was just an example that popped up on message boards.... you think a wealthy parent is going to stand by if they disagree with vaccinations and not raise a stink haha.... When parents write 6 figure checks they can make quite a stink and universities cannot just invent new students in September . There will be a small battle coming.
If majority are vaccinated & minority decline, then with up to 95% protection from complications & the other group willing to take the risk, who are they trying to protect by making vaccines a mandatory requirement? The vaccinated can still transmit this virus.
I use to discuss the coming proof of Covid vaccination card to enroll in any type of schools...discussed such early in the Pandemic. People here thought I was nuts until I reminded them its been done before when I was a kid. Parents had to show the school administrations their children's vaccination card prior to enrollment. I also remember vaccination trucks coming to schools about a month prior to the school session to give free vaccinations for those planning to enroll their children at the school. Simply, we've been through this before but maybe many have forgotten. Those that protest (anti-vaxxers)...they can home school like those that protested before. As for Universities...others planning to follow the same route...proof of Covid vaccination. Their liability to a student becoming infected / dying or chronic illnesses from Covid are too great if they choose to not require verification of Covid vaccination. Military service will soon require such, airline travel have already begun requiring such (e.g. Quantas), compete in certain sports and such especially those involving locker rooms. Note - Not all states in the U.S. requires proof of vaccination when I was a kid. The states / I enrolled in school that required vaccination...Illinois, South Dakota, South France and all schools abroad of U.S. military soldiers. wrbtrader
The Biden administration is developing a national coronavirus 'vaccine-passport' program for Americans Thomas Colson 4 hours ago President Joe Biden. Getty The Biden administration is reportedly working on a national vaccine-passport program. The plan would enable people to prove they've been vaccinated before entering some private venues. Passports could be required to enter some sports arenas, music venues, or restaurants. See more stories on Insider's business page. The Biden administration is working on a vaccine-passport program that would allow people to prove they have received a coronavirus vaccination before entering venues that have been closed during the pandemic, such as offices or movie theatres, The Washington Post and CNN reported. Five officials, who spoke anonymously, told The Post that the White House is pushing efforts by federal agencies and private companies to develop the program. Vaccine passports have been widely touted around the world as a way for various industries to start returning to normal while minimizing the risk of COVID-19 outbreaks. They could be required for entry to sports arenas, music venues, or restaurants, or to travel internationally. The passports will likely take the form of a scannable code displayed on smartphones, private developers told the Post, while users without smartphones will be able to print codes onto paper. New York has already announced an app called the Excelsior Pass which will allow a user to prove they have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or have recently tested negative, Forbes reported. One official suggested to CNN that vaccine passports could be required for people returning to work. The White House declined to comment to the Post on record but pointed to comments made by Jeffrey Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, who said at a press briefing in March: "As we increase the number of people vaccinated, we know some people may have a need to demonstrate that they are vaccinated. "The private sector and not-for-profit coalitions are already beginning to work on this. "Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people's privacy." The idea of vaccine passports is gathering momentum worldwide, too. Similar schemes are being considered by the United Kingdom's government and the European Union has announced plans for a "Digital Green Certificate" which will prove whether a carrier has been vaccinated, tested negative, or recovered from the virus. "With this certificate, we aim to help member states reinstate freedom of movement in a safe, responsible, and trusted manner," European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said at a press conference earlier in March. The Ada Lovelace Institute, an NGO, said 30 countries around the world including China and the UAE are considering or already using a vaccine passport scheme as they seek to return to normal life, Insider's Marianna Guenot reported. https://www.businessinsider.com/the...-developing-a-vaccine-passport-program-2021-3 ---------- wrbtrader
Stanford Scientists Reverse Engineer Moderna Vaccine, Post Code on Github The secrets of the Moderna vaccine are there for all to see, they run about two pages. https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article...-engineer-moderna-vaccine-post-code-on-github Stanford scientists saved drops of the COVID-19 vaccine destined for the garbage can, reverse engineered them, and have posted the mRNA sequence that powers the vaccine on GitHub for all to see. The GitHub post is four pages long. The first two are an explanation by the team of scientists about the work, the second two pages are the entire mRNA sequence for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. “RNA vaccines have become a key tool in moving forward through the challenges raised both in the current pandemic and in numerous other public health and medical challenges,” the scientists said on GitHub. “Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNA. Standard methods facilitate such sequencing.” According to Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura, this isn’t technically “reverse-engineering” a vaccine. “We didn't reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021,” they told Motherboard in an email. “As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies. Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility.” The scientists were light on details about how they acquired the Moderna sample. “For this work, RNAs were obtained as discards from the small portions of vaccine doses that remained in vials after immunization; such portions would have been required to be otherwise discarded and were analyzed under FDA authorization for research use,” they said. Fire and Shoura explained that none of what they studied came from usable vaccines. “This project did not waste vaccine material or reduce in any way the number of vaccine doses available to the public,” they told Motherboard. “None of the residual ‘dregs’ that we used for this work came from vaccines that could have been otherwise administered. Think of the thin layer of milk coating a carton that had been fully used and emptied yesterday and sitting on the kitchen counter—if we sequenced that, we'd get a full picture of the cow genome even though the small quantity of milk would be of no use.” The scientists requested permission from the FDA to keep emptied vials that were going to be discarded at Stanford and Veteran’s Affairs vaccination sites. “Given the ability of Next Generation Sequencing technology to detect even minuscule amounts of RNA, this was more than sufficient to assemble a coding region for the two vaccine RNAs,” they said. The scientists told Motherboard they felt that their peers working at Moderna/NIH and BioNTech/Pfizer had done the world a great service and that releasing the RNA sequences will help continue to benefit humanity. “While anyone interested could data-mine and filter these sequences out later, there is a substantial economy of scale and educational value in having the sequences available ASAP and in not having to guess where they have come from,” they said. This isn’t the first time a COVID-19 vaccine has been reverse-engineered and shared online. On December 25, 2020, PowerDNS founder Bert Hubert used publicly available information about the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine to figure out its mRNA sequence. According to Shoura and Fire, the FDA cleared the Stanford project’s decision to share the sequence with the community. “We did contact Moderna a couple of weeks ago to indicate that we were hoping to include the sequence in a publication and asking if there was anything that we should reference with respect to this... no response or objection from them, so we assume that everyone is busy doing important work.” This is all exciting, and it’s great for the public to have access to the mRNA code that’s part of a vaccine many of us are injecting into our bodies. It also probably won’t make more people get the vaccine. The supply chain behind this kind of medicine is complicated and isn't easily DIYed. It's worth noting, however, that this sort of research makes information about the vaccine more accessible to everyone, which is a big deal considering the patents that big pharma has on many of the vaccines, and the fact that the world has a massive task ahead of it in trying to distribute the vaccine to billions of people around the world. “Nobody will be making an mRNA vaccine in their garage any time soon,” engineer Jason Neubert said in a blog post about the reverse-engineered Pifzer vaccine.
Pfizer says its COVID-19 vaccine protects younger teens https://www.wral.com/pfizer-says-its-covid-19-vaccine-protects-younger-teens/19603463/ Pfizer announced Wednesday that its COVID-19 vaccine is safe and strongly protective in kids as young as 12, a step toward possibly beginning shots in this age group before they head back to school in the fall. Most COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out worldwide are for adults, who are at higher risk from the coronavirus. Pfizer’s vaccine is authorized for ages 16 and older. But vaccinating children of all ages will be critical to stopping the pandemic — and helping schools, at least the upper grades, start to look a little more normal after months of disruption. In a study of 2,260 U.S. volunteers ages 12 to 15, preliminary data showed there were no cases of COVID-19 among fully vaccinated adolescents compared to 18 among those given dummy shots, Pfizer reported. It's a small study, that hasn't yet been published, so another important piece of evidence is how well the shots revved up the kids’ immune systems. Researchers reported high levels of virus-fighting antibodies, somewhat higher than were seen in studies of young adults. Kids had side effects similar to young adults, the company said. The main side effects are pain, fever, chills and fatigue, particularly after the second dose. The study will continue to track participants for two years for more information about long-term protection and safety. Dr. Philip J. Landrigan of Boston College said the results are encouraging. “It’s hard to get kids to comply with masking and distancing, so something that gives them hard protection and takes them out of the mix of spreading the virus is all for the good,” said Landrigan , who was not involved in the study. Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech in the coming weeks plan to ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and European regulators to allow emergency use of the shots starting at age 12. “We share the urgency to expand the use of our vaccine,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. He expressed “the hope of starting to vaccinate this age group before the start of the next school year" in the United States. Pfizer isn’t the only company seeking to lower the age limit for its vaccine. Results also are expected by the middle of this year from a U.S. study of Moderna’s vaccine in 12- to 17-year-olds. But in a sign that the findings were promising, the FDA already allowed both companies to begin U.S. studies in children 11 and younger, working their way to as young as 6-month-old. “We are longing for a normal life. This is especially true for our children,” BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said in a statement. AstraZeneca last month began a study of its vaccine among 6- to 17-year-olds in Britain. Johnson & Johnson is planning its own pediatric studies. And in China, Sinovac recently announced it has submitted preliminary data to Chinese regulators showing its vaccine is safe in children as young as 3. While most COVID-19 vaccines being used globally were first tested in tens of thousands of adults, pediatric studies won’t need to be nearly as large. Scientists have safety information from those studies and from subsequent vaccinations in millions more adults. One key question is the dosage: Pfizer gave the 12-and-older participants the same dose adults receive, while testing different doses in younger children. It's not clear how quickly the FDA would act on Pfizer's request to allow vaccination starting at age 12. The agency has taken about three weeks to review and authorize each of the vaccines currently available for adults. That process included holding a public meeting of outside experts to review and vote on the safety and effectiveness of each shot. The process for reviewing data in children could be shorter, given FDA’s familiarity with each vaccine. An agency spokeswoman said the FDA had no information to share on how the review would work, including whether additional public meetings would be required. Another question is when the country would have enough supply of shots — and people to get them into adolescents' arms — to let kids start getting in line. Supplies are set to steadily increase over the spring and summer, at the same time states are opening vaccinations to younger, healthier adults who until now haven't had a turn. Children represent about 13% of COVID-19 cases documented in the U.S. And while children are far less likely than adults to get seriously ill, at least 268 have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. alone and more than 13,500 have been hospitalized, according to a tally by the American Academy of Pediatrics. That’s more than die from the flu in an average year. Additionally, a small number have developed a serious inflammatory condition linked to the coronavirus. Caleb Chung, who turns 13 later this week, agreed to volunteer after his father, a Duke University pediatrician, presented the option. He doesn't know if he received the vaccine or a placebo. “Usually I’m just at home doing online school and there’s not much I can really do to fight back against the virus,” Caleb said in a recent interview. The study “was really somewhere that I could actually help out.” His father, Dr. Richard Chung, said he’s proud of his son and all the other children volunteering for the needle pricks, blood tests and other tasks a study entails. “We need kids to do these trials so that kids can get protected. Adults can’t do that for them,” Chung said.
In other news, extreme liberal darling, Andrew Cuomo continues to impress everyone with his handling of the Corona Virus. Take a bow, ET trolls, your extreme liberal darling is getting his accolades or not? Looks like an April fools joke. https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-ravaging-york-again-cuomo-090127189.html