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Three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine as of Tuesday, according to the White House, setting a new milestone in the country’s fight against the pandemic. But with a continued surge of cases, hospitalizations and deaths due to the delta variant of the coronavirus, President Joe Biden plans a speech Thursday to outline a “six-pronged strategy” to “get the pandemic under control,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. (Wingrove, 9/7)

AstraZeneca Plc Chief Executive Pascal Soriot said booster COVID vaccine doses may not be needed for everyone in Britain and rushing into a nationwide rollout of third doses risks piling extra pressure on the National Health Service (NHS), the Telegraph reported on Tuesday. "We need the weight of the clinical evidence gathered from real world use before we can make an informed decision on a third dose," Soriot wrote in the newspaper. (9/7)

Kavita Patel, a primary care physician at Mary’s Center in the Washington area, routinely throws away perfectly good doses of coronavirus vaccine. When she opens a new multidose vial, any shots that don’t go into arms that day have to be discarded. In recent days, she was tempted to do something different: use one of those soon-to-be wasted doses to boost her own immunity. It might seem a no-brainer, but nothing is simple when it comes to coronavirus vaccine boosters. The Biden administration’s coronavirus task force wants to roll out boosters the week of Sept. 20. Too soon, some experts have declared. Not soon enough, others say. (Achenbach, 9/7)

Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine cuts the risk of getting infected with the disease by about half, according to the latest results of a trial involving almost half a million health workers in South Africa.  The vast majority of the breakthrough infections were mild, Glenda Gray, co-leader of the study known as Sisonke, said in an interview, citing unpublished data from the trial, which had earlier shown the shot’s effectiveness against severe illness. (Kew and Sguazzin, 9/7)

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $1.67 million to researchers at five institutions to study potential links between coronavirus vaccinations and menstruation, the agency announced Aug. 30. ... The year-long studies will exclusively incorporate participants who have not yet been vaccinated — both those who intend to be as well as those who don’t — to be able to study possible changes to their menstrual cycle before and after vaccination, Bianchi said. (McShane, 9/7)

Over the past several months, a series of studies has found that some people mount an extraordinarily powerful immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. Their bodies produce very high levels of antibodies, but they also make antibodies with great flexibility — likely capable of fighting off the coronavirus variants circulating in the world but also likely effective against variants that may emerge in the future. "One could reasonably predict that these people will be quite well protected against most — and perhaps all of — the SARS-CoV-2 variants that we are likely to see in the foreseeable future," says Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University who helped lead several of the studies. (Doucleff, 9/7)

The world still needs more — and better — Covid-19 vaccines. But a major hurdle stands in the way of the development of new vaccines, as well as the critical studies needed to determine the best way to use these important tools, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) warned in a letter published Tuesday in the journal Nature. (Branswell, 9/7)