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An expert group convened by the World Health Organization said Tuesday it “strongly supports urgent and broad access” to booster doses of COVID-19 vaccine amid the global spread of omicron, capping a reversal of the U.N. agency’s repeated insistence last year that boosters weren’t necessary for healthy people and contributed to vaccine inequity. In a statement, WHO said its expert group concluded that immunization with authorized COVID-19 vaccines provide high levels of protection against severe disease and death amid the continuing spread of the hugely contagious omicron variant. WHO eased back on its earlier position in January by saying boosters were recommended once countries had adequate supplies and after protecting their most vulnerable. (3/8)

Three destinations — including two that had kept the coronavirus at bay for most of the pandemic — moved into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s highest warning level for travel on Monday. Americans should avoid traveling to New Zealand, Hong Kong and Thailand because of very high levels of covid-19, the public health agency said in an update that placed the destinations into the “Level 4” category. All three had most recently been categorized as “Level 3,” with high levels of the virus. (Sampson, 3/8)

Austria’s government suspended a law that made coronavirus vaccinations mandatory, stepping back from one of Europe’s strictest measures as the omicron variant changes the way officials deal with the illness. The government in Vienna will review its vaccine policy in three months and still has the option to react flexibly to developments, Johannes Rauch, who was appointed Health Minister this week, told reporters Wednesday. (Eder, 3/9)

Anxious consumers concerned over nuclear-safety risks arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are pushing up prices for iodine and potassium iodide pills. Costs for the tablets — which helps protect the thyroid from radioactive chemicals — have surged in recent weeks after President Vladimir Putin ordered the attack. Russian shelling caused a fire at a building on the site of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — Europe’s biggest such facility — and the country’s forces have destroyed an atomic-physics lab under international safeguards in Ukraine’s second-largest city. Nuclear-waste facilities in Kyiv were also damaged during the first week of the war. (Ballentine, 3/8)