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The Pentagon formally dropped its COVID-19 vaccination mandate Tuesday, but a new memo signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also gives commanders some discretion in how or whether to deploy troops who are not vaccinated. Austin’s memo has been widely anticipated ever since legislation signed into law on Dec. 23 gave him 30 days to rescind the mandate. The Defense Department had already stopped all related personnel actions, such as discharging troops who refused the shot. (Baldor, 1/11)

The move comes weeks after President Joe Biden signed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, and with it a plan to rescind [Defense Secretary Lloyd] Austin’s August 2021 memo directing the services to create a vaccination policy. “The Department will continue to promote and encourage COVID-19 vaccination for all Service members,” Austin wrote. “The Department has made COVID-19 vaccination as easy and convenient as possible, resulting in vaccines administered to over two million Service members and 96 percent of the force ― Active and Reserve ― being fully vaccinated.” (Myers, 1/10)

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders sent Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) a letter this week asking the drug company to halt planned U.S. price increases on its COVID-19 vaccine, saying price hikes could make the shot unaffordable for millions of Americans. (Erman, 1/10)

“As you know, the federal government, over the years, has supported Moderna every step of the way going back to 2013 when your company reportedly only had three employees. Now, in the midst of a continuing public health crisis and a growing federal deficit, is not the time for Moderna to be quadrupling the price of this vaccine,” he wrote. “Now is not the time for unacceptable corporate greed.” (Weixel, 1/10)

Countries should consider recommending that passengers wear masks on long-haul flights, given the rapid spread of the latest Omicron subvariant of COVID-19 in the United States, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Tuesday. In Europe, the XBB.1.5 subvariant was detected in small but growing numbers, WHO and Europe officials said at a press briefing. (Tétrault-Farber and Grover, 1/10)

In a statement today, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) European office said data from countries in the region with strong genomic surveillance show a small but growing presence of XBB.1.5, the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 subvariant that has grown rapidly in the northeastern United States. (Schnirring, 1/10)

Some of China’s most populous provinces have passed the peak in the current wave of Covid-19 infections sweeping across the country, officials said Monday. In central China’s Henan province, 89% of the 100 million residents had already been infected by the Omicron variants by Friday, said Kan Quancheng, director of the provincial health commission. (Fan, 1/10)

The director of the World Health Organization’s Europe office said Tuesday that the agency sees “no immediate threat” for the European region from a COVID-19 outbreak in China, but more information is needed. China is battling a nationwide outbreak of the coronavirus after abruptly easing restrictions. (1/10)

For months, drugmakers have been pleading with regulators to lower the bar for authorizing antibody drugs for Covid. The virus, they noted, had evolved fast enough to render every previous antibody obsolete. Any new antibody may only survive a few months or a year before variants evade it — too fast for a company to profit and potentially too fast to manufacture and test the drug in clinical trials before it goes extinct. (Mast, 1/10)