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More than half of the adults in the United States have been at least partially vaccinated against Covid-19, a remarkable accomplishment. As it has matured, the US vaccine program has revealed geographic and demographic groups that show either high or low acceptance of the vaccine, leading to a small avalanche of speculation regarding the divergent trends. (Kent Sepkowitz, 6/17)

The rise of the dangerous delta variant of the coronavirus gives new urgency to the effort to get people vaccinated. Delta has been spreading phenomenally fast. It’s already the dominant strain in India, the U.K. and Singapore, and it has a foothold in more than 80 countries. While it accounts for only about 10% of U.S. cases of Covid-19 so far, that share is expected to balloon. There’s evidence, too, that the variant may cause more severe disease. Data from the U.K. suggest people who contract this strain are twice as likely to be hospitalized as those who caught a previous form of the coronavirus. (6/18)

In the early days of the growing coronavirus outbreak that would soon become a pandemic, an elite group of international scientists gathered on a conference call to discuss a shocking possibility: The virus looked like it might have been engineered in a laboratory. “I remember it very well,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert at the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview with me on Wednesday. “We decided on the call the situation really needed to be looked into carefully.” (Alison Young, 6/17)

Hospitals and other health care settings are filled with some of the most vulnerable people in society, by nature. Some years ago, as part of an effort to keep patients safer, it became the norm for hospitals and other health care settings to require flu and other common vaccinations for all employees. Some were initially skeptical of this policy, but it’s now widely accepted. Today, most would agree with both the science and the common sense behind hospital vaccination polices: Inexpensive, easy-to-administer and proven vaccines for influenza, measles, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases are the best and easiest way to keep our patients safe. A year and a half into this pandemic, with hundreds of millions of people now vaccinated worldwide and many dozens of clinical trials completed, science and common sense are once again in agreement. It’s clear that COVID vaccination should be required for health care workers. (Kevin W. Sowers and Mohan Suntha, 6/18)