Situation Report

COVID pandemic is officially over in the U.S., excess-deaths data show The COVID-19 pandemic is definitively over, according to two recent reports focused on the same metric. Ciara Linnane MarketWatch

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Biden administration suspends funding to Wuhan lab The Biden administration is suspending all federal funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the Chinese lab at the center of a controversy over the origins of the coronavirus, according to… nweixel The Hill

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The memo from an HHS official said the facility has repeatedly refused to provide documents and answer questions from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) about safety and security. HHS also told the lab it’s seeking to cut off funding permanently.

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Study shows bivalent COVID-19 booster outperforms monovalent version CIDRAP

A new Italian study finds that estimated relative vaccine effectiveness (rVE) was 49.3% for the bivalent (two-strain) booster and 26.9% for the monovalent (single-strain) booster, with protection lasting at least 4 months for the bivalent booster and waning fast for the monovalent version. The study appears in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

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