David Wallace-Wells writes:

In Gauteng, South Africa’s Omicron epicenter, the wave seems to be cresting. In other parts of the country, too, the terrifyingly fast rise of the new variant appears already to be slowing and even receding. This is very encouraging, since it suggests that Omicron waves elsewhere in the world may also be, if disorientingly fast, also mercifully short. But it is also a bit confusing, given that the wave has peaked well before anything like it had fully penetrated the local population, and given that everything we know about the new variant is that neither infection-acquired immunity nor two vaccine doses do much at all to stop transmission.

But this is not a phenomenon peculiar to Omicron. At earlier stages of the pandemic, in sometimes less dramatic ways, other waves have crested and declined much before crude models might’ve suggested the vulnerable population had been exhausted. Sometimes, this has led to premature predictions of early herd immunity: Last summer, Youyang Gu, who’d distinguished himself as a modeler of the pandemic, suggested that in parts of the U.S., at least, communities could be reaching “temporary herd immunity” with exposure levels between 10 percent and 35 percent. More recently, Philippe Lemoine has argued that population structure is a hugely underappreciated factor in pandemic spread, and that we shouldn’t keep turning back to models based on simple inputs like doubling time (how long it takes caseloads to grow by a factor of two) or Rt (how many people each infected person infects, on average).

On Friday, I spoke with Trevor Bedford, of Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, about how to make sense of this phenomenon, and how comfortably we can count on the Omicron waves taking a similar turn, on a similar timetable, elsewhere in the world. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports:

Moderna has backed down in a bitter dispute with the government over who deserves credit for a crucial component of its coronavirus shot, in a case that has major implications for the vaccine’s future distribution and Moderna’s future profits.

Moderna has decided for now not to take the final step in securing a patent — making the payment that would allow it to be issued — because doing so “could interfere with further discussions aimed at an amicable resolution” with the National Institutes of Health, Colleen Hussey, a spokeswoman for Moderna, said on Friday.

She said the company also wanted to “avoid any distraction” to ongoing collaborations as it races to determine whether it will need to modify its shot or take other steps to fight the fast-spreading Omicron variant. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports:

The U.S. government has over-counted the number of Americans who are at least partly vaccinated against the coronavirus, state officials warn, meaning millions more people are unprotected as the pandemic’s winter surge gathers steam.

Last weekend, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised a bellwether metric — the share of people 65 and older with at least one shot. The agency reduced the proportion from 99.9%, where it had been capped for weeks, to 95%, without changing its raw shot totals.

The move acknowledged a dynamic state officials have discovered: in collating reams of data on vaccinations, the U.S. has counted too many shots as first doses when they are instead second doses or booster shots. [Continue reading…]