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Attempts by Oxford University researchers and AstraZeneca Plc to create a nasal-spray version of their jointly developed COVID-19 shot suffered a setback on Tuesday as initial testing on humans did not yield the desired protection. An antibody response in the respiratory mucous membranes was seen in only a minority of participants in the trial, which was in the first of usually three phases of clinical testing, the University of Oxford said in a statement on Tuesday. (10/10)

The White House expects the rate of vaccination in its fall booster campaign to pick up over the coming weeks, and its COVID response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha on Friday characterized the initial pace as "a really good start." Jha estimated that between 13 million and 15 million Americans will have gotten the so-called bivalent booster by the end of [last] week. (Aboulenein and Erman, 10/7)

A divided U.S. appeals court has rejected a challenge by Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd to a Florida law barring businesses from requiring customers to show documentation proving they received a COVID-19 vaccine. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling on Thursday said the ban on "vaccine passports" adopted by Florida last year regulates economic conduct and not speech, so it does not violate Norwegian's free speech rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (Wiessner, 10/7)

During the height of the pandemic, 4 in 10 Americans misled others about their COVID-19 status or their adherence to public health measures designed to prevent the spread of the virus, according to a study published Monday in JAMA Network Open, a journal of the Chicago-based American Medical Association. (Lourgos, 10/10)

The risk of maternal critical care admission and preterm birth were much lower amid dominance of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant than during the Delta-dominant period, finds a Scottish study published late last week in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. (Van Beusekom, 10/10)

“People should plan on being able to get together with the people that they love,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said recently. But that optimism, as always, is tinted with caution. Families with members who are at high risk of developing severe COVID-19 illness should consider taking some additional precautions, officials say. (Money and Lin II, 10/10)

Long Covid eases with time, according to a study that found about 1% of coronavirus patients had persistent symptoms for a year or more. In the first rigorous assessment of the magnitude of long Covid on a global scale, researchers found 6.2% of people who had Covid-19 in the pandemic’s first two years experienced at least one of three main groups of symptoms three months later. (Gale, 10/10)