The second national CommuniVax report will be released this month. In the meantime, be sure to check out our previous reports and download our tools to support vaccine rollout efforts in your community.

Some updates from our local teams:

No, there’s no reason to think the covid-19 vaccines could cause infertility. But it matters how we talk about it. The infertility myth is particularly hard to debunk because it’s hard to disprove a negative — just because something scary hasn’t yet happened, people reason, doesn’t mean that it won’t. (Washington Post, 6/28/21)

Peer Pressure, Not Politics, May Matter Most When It Comes To Getting The COVID-19 Vaccine. Republicans are simply less likely to have friends who have been vaccinated. In a May survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, less than half of Republicans (46 percent) said that most or all of their friends had received at least a single dose of the vaccine. For Democrats, meanwhile, vaccination is the norm among their peers. Two-thirds said that most or all of their friends had been at least partially vaccinated. (FiveThirtyEight, 6/29/21)

When Parents Forbid the COVID Vaccine. Young people rarely get severely ill from the virus, but, of course, they can transmit it to others. Recently, in a conversation for “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” I spoke about the vaccine with a teen-ager who wants to get it but whose parents are in thrall to anti-vaccine misinformation. (New Yorker, 6/28/21)

Why Young Adults Are Among the Biggest Barriers to Mass Immunity. Pretty much everyone who was eager for a vaccine already has one, and public health officials now face an overlapping mix of inertia, fear, busy schedules and misinformation as they try — sometimes one person at a time — to cajole Gen Z into getting a shot.. (New York Times, 6/28/21)

As COVID-19 puts a spotlight on public health, future generations from Tuskegee are working to build back trust. Today, as COVID-19 and COVID vaccines shine a spotlight on medicine and public health, the descendants of these men are a living link to a horrific part of our history that, as President Clinton acknowledged, “many Americans would prefer not to remember but dare not forget.” (Get Vaccine Answers, 6/21)

Amish put faith in God's will and herd immunity over vaccine. The vaccination drive is lagging far behind in many Amish communities across the U.S. following a wave of virus outbreaks that swept through their churches and homes during the past year. In Ohio's Holmes County, home to the nation's largest concentration of Amish, just 14% of the county's overall population is fully vaccinated. (ABC News, 6/28/21)

Facebook Is a ‘Giant Source’ of Vaccine Misinformation, White House Chief of Staff Says. “I think the platforms need to do better. I think particularly Facebook needs to do better,” Ronald Klain said. “I’ve told [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg directly than when we gather groups of people who are not vaccinated, and we ask them, “Why aren’t you vaccinated?” and they tell us things that are wrong, tell us things that are untrue, and we ask them where they’ve heard that. The most common answer is Facebook.” (The Wrap, 7/1/21)

Same Vaccine, Different Effects: Why Women Are Feeling Worse after the Jab. Nicole Woitowich, a research assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, focuses on the intersections of sex and gender in medical research and practice. She points out that, when it comes to understanding the variations in immune responses, researchers should be looking at sex hormones. (She adds that it’s important to distinguish between sex and gender, which are not mutually exclusive.). (The Walrus, 6/29/21)

Vaccine hesitancy in migrant communities: a rapid review of latest evidence. By refusing or delaying vaccination, vaccine hesitant individuals and communities undermine the prevention, and ultimately, elimination of communicable diseases against which safe and effective vaccines are available. We reviewed recent evidence of vaccine hesitancy within migrant communities in the context of increased human mobility and widespread anti-immigrant sentiment and manifest xenophobia. (Current Opinion in Immunology, 8/21)

Long COVID Survey Report. Long-hauler stories prompt greater concern among 64% of Americans. After learning more about long COVID, particularly from people suffering from it, about 40% of unvaccinated people say they likely will consider getting the COVID-19 vaccine, including nearly a third of people who are vaccine hesitant. (Prevent Epidemics, 6/30/21)

Growing Gaps in U.S. Vaccination Rates Show Regions at Risk. In the least vaccinated group of counties, many of which are in the South and Central regions of the U.S., less than half as many people have gotten at least one Covid vaccine dose as in the most vaccinated counties in the cities and on the coasts. Those less vaccinated places are not catching up, either. (Bloomberg, 6/29/21)

See also: Vaccines are a tough sell in the sparsely populated, skeptical Mountain West. (New York Times, 6/26/21)

Rush to close vaccination gap for Hispanics. Hispanic communities, even as they’re among the most eager to receive the shots, are still facing barriers to vaccination that could leave them vulnerable to the virus this summer, according to interviews with nearly two dozen people working on vaccination efforts, including state officials and community groups. (POLITICO, 6/27/21)

Something to celebrate: delivering vaccines to essential workers. Meatpacking plants, agriculture settings, and grocery stores are ideal workplaces to deliver vaccines based on Household Pulse Survey data showing that more than one-third of workers in these industries have not been vaccinated. These are many of the same workplaces in which many workers have died of Covid-19 and in which workers remain vulnerable, especially with the end of indoor mask orders and the spread of new variants. (STAT, 7/1/21)

As variant rises, vaccine plan targets ‘movable middle’. Thrown off-stride to reach its COVID-19 vaccination goal, the Biden administration is sending A-list officials across the country, devising ads for niche markets and enlisting community organizers to persuade unvaccinated people to get a shot. The strategy has the trappings of a political campaign, complete with data crunching to identify groups that can be won over.. (AP, 6/27/21)

Mobile Clinics Can Help Reduce Health Inequity. As the number of COVID cases falls in the United States, the frameworks used by mobile vaccine clinics should not be abandoned. Instead, these frameworks should be adopted and applied to health conditions that disproportionately impact communities of color. They provide health care delivery one path forward to achieving health equity. (Scientific American, 6/30/21)

What constitutes success in the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines? As long as speed is the only measure by which countries' vaccination programmes are compared, we should not expect decision makers to calibrate vaccine roll-outs to achieve objectives that deviate from the path of least resistance. (The Lancet, 6/25/21)

Global policies on COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy vary widely by country according to new online tracker. Currently, 91 countries have policies that allow for at least some pregnant people to receive COVID vaccines—45 of which broadly permit or recommend vaccines in pregnancy. (The HUB, 6/28/21)

Vaccine Mandates Are Coming. Good. When vaccination is the default, most people will get vaccinated. Mandates still aren’t popular; few public health measures are. But they work. (New York Times, 6/28/21)

How to Develop a Covid-19 Employee Vaccination Policy. Houston Methodist, an eight-hospital academic medical center, developed a seven-step process that can help all employers make this decision. It includes guidelines for allowing workers to be temporarily or permanently exempted from the mandate. (Harvard Business Review, 7/1/21)

States hesitant to adopt digital COVID vaccine verification. Across the U.S., many hard-hit businesses eager to return to normal have been reluctant to demand proof of vaccination from customers. And the public and the politicians in many places have made it clear they don’t care for the idea. (AP, 6/26/21)

Study finds sign of long-lasting protection from COVID-19 vaccines. The study is a positive development in the discussion around whether booster shots of the vaccines will be needed and when, though there has not been a definitive answer to that question yet. (The Hill, 6/28/21)

See also: SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines induce persistent human germinal centre responses (Nature, 6/28/21)

COVID vaccines: combining AstraZeneca and Pfizer may boost immunity – new study. The trial’s results are preliminary, having yet to be reviewed by other scientists, but the answer appears to be yes. Giving people different types of COVID-19 vaccine appears not only to be safe, but also a potential way of boosting protection against the coronavirus. (The Conversation, 7/1/21)

Moderna’s Covid Shot Produces Antibodies Against Delta Variant. Moderna researchers tested blood samples from eight people for antibodies against versions of the spike protein from different coronavirus variants, including delta, which emerged in India. The vaccine “produced neutralizing titers against all variants tested,” the company said in a statement. (Bloomberg, 6/29/21)

ACIP Backs Flu and COVID Vaccine Co-Administration. In a unanimous 14-0 vote on Thursday, the committee approved language for co-administration of influenza and COVID-19 vaccines, in line with current CDC guidance that says COVID-19 vaccines can be administered with other vaccines, though providers should be aware of increased reactogenicity. (MedPage Today, 6/25/21)

See also: 12 lessons Covid-19 taught us about developing vaccines during a pandemic (STAT, 6/30/21)