Good news on vaccines

As usual, I’ll leave the 20 or so free items in this Fix the News for you and will focus on the roughly 35 that require a subscription.

Given the difficult week here on vaccines, let’s focus on good vaccine news elsewhere:

— England and Wales have started rolling out the world’s first vaccine against gonorrhea, targeting young adults through national clinics, The Guardian reports. The advance comes as increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics has made the disease more difficult to treat.

— In 2024, lower-income countries supported by the vaccine alliance Gavi contributed more than $250 million, a record, toward their own immunization programs, Gavi says. Gavi is a public-private partnership that helps vaccinate more than half of the world’s children against some of the deadliest diseases.

— Rotavirus is a highly contagious disease that used to infect nearly all children before their fifth birthday and killed a half million of them worldwide each year. 

Countries that introduced the rotavirus vaccine experienced a 59 percent median reduction in rotavirus hospitalizations among children under 5 and a 36 percent decrease in deaths, says the website DefeatDD.