Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of June 27, 2022

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of June 27, 2022–July 1, 2022.

The Washington Post (6/30, Johnson) reports, “This fall, vaccine makers will begin rolling out coronavirus booster vaccines better tailored to fight the current phase of the pandemic.” The FDA “announced that the fall shots would include a component from BA.4 and BA.5, the Omicron subvariants gaining ground in the United States.” Though “the precise formula has not been tested in people yet...studies showed that vaccines tuned to fight a previous version of Omicron modestly increased the short-term immune response in people compared with more shots of the original.”

The New York Times (6/30, Weiland) reports this “decision came just two days after the agency’s committee of independent vaccine experts overwhelmingly voted for regulators to adopt more advanced vaccines tailored to forms of Omicron.” The FDA “recommended that manufacturers produce a so-called bivalent vaccine targeting BA.4 and BA.5 along with the original coronavirus.”

The AP (6/30, Neergaard, Perrone) reports, “Pfizer and Moderna already were brewing and testing boosters updated against the first Omicron mutant in anticipation of an October rollout.”

HealthDay (6/29) reports, “An enhanced approach for assessing cardiovascular health, Life’s Essential 8, has been developed, according to an American Heart Association (AHA) Presidential Advisory published online” in the journal Circulation.

Healio (6/29, Schaffer) reports the updated “checklist that now includes sleep health metrics showed about 80% of U.S. adults have low to moderate CV health, with lowest scores occurring in the areas of diet, physical activity and BMI.” The new measurement tool, once known as Life’s Simple 7, “was revamped to allow improved means for measuring and monitoring CV health to achieve greater health equity, and now includes the entire life course.” Among the metrics included are “health behaviors like diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure and sleep, and health factors like body weight, lipids, blood glucose and BP,” with “a person’s overall CV health score” now “the unweighted average of the eight component metric scores.”

The Washington Post (6/28, Sun, Diamond, Nirappil) reports, “The Biden administration will begin sending out tens of thousands of vaccine doses to clinics nationwide in an effort to control a record U.S. monkeypox outbreak that many experts say is far larger than the official count of 306 cases, officials announced on Tuesday.” This “vaccination strategy, which officials characterized as part of a broader push for more testing and public awareness of monkeypox, will focus on distributing doses to states with the highest number of confirmed cases of the disease.” Also, officials “said they were broadening access to the vaccines.”

CNN (6/28, Goodman) reports “the government will make 56,000 of” the 64,000 Jynneos vaccine doses “available to states in phase one of the roll out.” Furthermore, “public health officials are also considering whether to use a second older type of vaccine called ACAM.”

Bloomberg Law (6/27, Vittorio, Subscription Publication) reports HHS has “agreed to solicit feedback on its data breach reporting system after a federal government watchdog suggested it seek input on obstacles the health care industry faces.” The article adds, “The number of data breaches reported to HHS has spiked since 2015 as [physicians], insurers, and others in the industry have grappled with cybersecurity threats from hacking or unauthorized access to information, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.”

The New York Times (6/24, A1, Liptak) reported, “The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years.” So-called trigger bans “in at least eight states swiftly took effect… immediately after” the ruling, and “more states are expected to follow in the coming days.”

NPR (6/24, Simmons-Duffin) reported that AMA President Dr. Jack Resneck Jr. “condemned” the ruling “and said it is ‘a direct attack on the practice of medicine and the patient-physician relationship, and a brazen violation of patients’ rights to evidence-based reproductive health services.’”

Editor’s Note: Read the statement from AMA President Jack Resneck Jr., M.D.

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