Flu deaths in children hit new record as vaccination rates decrease: CDC
(NEW YORK) — The number of kids dying from influenza in the 2023-2024 season has set a new record for a regular flu season, after one new death was reported last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
There were 200 pediatric flu-related deaths in the 2023-2024 season, compared to the previous high of 199 during the 2019-2022 season.
About 80% of the kids that died from flu this season were not fully vaccinated against influenza, CDC data shows. Nearly half of the children had at least one pre-existing medical condition.
Everyone over the age of six months is recommended to get their annual flu vaccine before the end of October, according to the CDC.
Children up to 8 years old receiving their first flu shot should receive two doses if they previously have not, the CDC notes.
Older adults over the age of 65, who are at higher risk of severe illness including hospitalization and death, may opt for a higher dose flu shot for further protection.
“Vaccination remains our most effective tool to prevent illness and reduce the risk of serious complications in children,” said Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News medical contributor.
Vaccination rates among children for flu have been declining in recent years. About 53.9% of children were vaccinated against influenza this season, about 2.2% points lower than last season and 8.5% points lower than pre-pandemic.
“The decline in flu vaccination rates among children is deeply concerning and is at least partly linked to the rise in pediatric cases we’re witnessing,” Brownstein said.
Estimates show that flu vaccination reduced the risk of flu medical visits by about two-thirds and halved the risk of hospitalization among kids, according to the CDC.
“We must address this drop in vaccinations to prevent further unnecessary and preventable loss of young lives,” Brownstein added.
The influenza virus spreads year-round, but flu activity typically picks up in the fall and winter, peaking between the months of December and February.
While the impact of flu varies from season to season, estimates from the CDC show the virus has resulted in up to 41 million illnesses, 710,000 hospitalizations and 51,000 deaths annually in the past decade, according to the CDC.
“The record number of pediatric flu deaths this season is a stark indicator of how severe influenza can be,” Brownstein said.
(NEW YORK) — Sara Anne Willette has spent more than 1,620 days in isolation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The New Jersey resident took health precautions in public before the pandemic because of her common variable immunodeficiency, which means she doesn’t make enough antibodies to fight infections.
Simple tasks like going for a walk down the street or taking a trip to the grocery store are laden with safety hurdles and anxiety for Willette.
Stressful tasks, like moving from Iowa to New Jersey during the pandemic for her husband’s new job, are now even more taxing. The two drove overnight to avoid crowds at gas stations and rest stops, and she’s prepared to do it again. The substantial health precautions in her day-to-day life are forcing her and her family to pack up their life once more and look for a new home in the countryside.
“I’m angry that society is largely inaccessible and I have to risk my life for the bare minimum, like medical care,” Willette told ABC News in a phone call. “Why live in civilization if all of it is completely inaccessible?”
More than four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Willette is among the immunocompromised and disabled Americans who’ve complete changed their way of living to survive.
Her anger was tinged with disappointment as she talked about how the rest of the world has gone back to normal despite the hundreds of people across the country dying from COVID-19 each week amid a summer surge of the virus.
COVID-19 has also been a debilitating event for tens of millions of people who have or are currently experiencing long COVID, which in some cases has been defined as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
With some lawmakers beginning to propose mask bans in hopes of reducing crime, it’s no longer an option for some to live life normally among the rest of society.
Willette was among the people ABC News checked back in with after previously talking to them about isolating two years after the pandemic began.
Finding a new normal
There are simple joys that Willette misses: having a garden, running, walking, letting her dogs run without a leash and drinking coffee on a porch.
She’s planning on moving to the mountains — somewhere between New Hampshire and Virginia — and gaining enough acreage to allow her and her family to embrace the activities they lost during the pandemic. However, being alone out in the countryside isn’t the goal for Willette.
Rather, she intends to build a pathogen-aware community. That means buying enough land so other disabled, immunocompromised or health-conscious able-bodied people who don’t want to get COVID-19 can join them and create a home of their own.
“We want something that feels like normal but is set up in a way that we decrease harm for everyone in the community,” Willette said. “We can’t do that in an urban area or even in a suburban area. There are too many risks.”
Her mother and mother-in-law intend to move and join Willette, her husband and her son on the property as well.
For Charis Hill, a California resident who has a systemic inflammatory disease and takes immunosuppressive medications, it’s been hard to access an in-person doctor’s appointment since many safety precautions for COVID-19 are no longer being taken in medical care facilities.
As someone with “high-level medical needs,” the lack of COVID precautions has even made seeking routine care a challenge.
“Just the fact that a medical environment that is supposed to know what a virus can do, most medical environments no longer require masking, and that’s what makes it unsafe for people like me to go, for anybody to go,” Hill told ABC over the phone.
“The impact of the delayed care, where people can’t go get routine care, that’s going to affect the whole health care system. Emergencies happen because of delayed care.”
Despite the stress and forced isolation, they find moments of joy growing their own food in their garden, and stay busy by working to reduce the local feral cat population through Trap-Neuter-Return practices.
They break their isolation monthly to meet at a park with a close-knit circle of friends who take similar safety precautions — they’re all masked, socially distanced and have tested beforehand.
“That’s really the only way for me to meet strangers and also to make new friends,” Hill said.
Mask bans would further bar immunocompromised people from public life, according to Hill.
Such bans “make it unsafe for us to exist,” Hill noted, because people may feel pressure not to wear masks when they’re sick or if immunocompromised people are worried about backlash for doing so.
With more people testing positive for COVID this summer, and with the fall and winter virus season ahead, Hill says society’s “new normal” should involve free testing, vaccines, access to at-home antiviral therapy paxlovid and flexible hybrid working options to mitigate the spread of illnesses.
“We need a new normal, and a new normal that is equitable for everyone, and that not only prioritizes high risk people, but that also reduces infection overall,” Hill said.
COVID concerns for the immunocompromised population
Immunocompromised people — about 3% of the adult population in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health — continue to face potentially serious medical complications or death when it comes to COVID-19. Even for those who were not previously at risk now have seen life-changing heath impacts.
“Long COVID can happen to anyone, and I have certainly seen young, healthy, vigorous athletes have prolonged, debilitating symptoms from long COVID,” Dr. Jeannina Smith, the medical director of University of Wisconsin’s Transplant Infectious Disease Program, told ABC over the phone.
However, society has largely appeared to have moved on. The CDC stopped recording some COVID-19 related data and some politicians have proposed mask bans as a potential solution to crime.
“It takes us a step back for public health,” Hill said. “We have other pandemics that are coming, and it’s going to make it harder to reenact mask mandates if we need them in the future.”
For the immunocompromised, regular society could seem like a minefield, according to Dr. Cassandra M. Pierre, the medical director of Public Health Programs and the associate hospital epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center.
She noted that people at higher risk for complications “are still, unfortunately, in our hospitals today. We see that they have this forced risk of going on to develop critical COVID or potentially even die. This is still occurring. COVID is still happening.”
This is all happening despite a better understanding of disease transmission and the information needed to be better equipped to empower communities to protect their health, Pierre added.
Patients have been harassed or mocked for wearing masks in public, Dr. Jeannina Smith noted, despite international and national medical organizations emphasizing the importance of mask wearing as a mitigation tactic for illnesses. Hill has experienced this first hand.
“You can’t look at someone and know that they’re receiving immunosuppression for an organ transplant or an autoimmune condition, and they remain at risk,” Smith said.
“Even if you don’t have individual risk, any person can still spread COVID to someone who has higher risk,” she said. “In fact, much of the spread continues to be from asymptomatic person. The very idea that we would criminalize wanting to protect our fellow citizens is pretty horrific.”
The federal government has recently changed its tune amid the summer COVID spike and is preparing for the upcoming fall and winter season by approving and granting emergency use authorization for updated COVID-19 vaccines and restarting its free at-home COVID tests program.
(SILVER SPRING, Md.) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved the first new drug to treat people with schizophrenia in more than 30 years.
Cobenfy, manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb, combines two drugs, xanomeline and trospium chloride, and is taken as a twice-daily pill. In clinical trials, this combination helped manage symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking, which are common in schizophrenia.
“Schizophrenia is a leading cause of disability worldwide. It is a severe, chronic mental illness that is often damaging to a person’s quality of life,” Tiffany Farchione, M.D., director of the Division of Psychiatry, Office of Neuroscience in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in the approval announcement.
“This drug takes the first new approach to schizophrenia treatment in decades,” Farchione continued. “This approval offers a new alternative to the antipsychotic medications people with schizophrenia have previously been prescribed.”
Cobenfy offers new hope for people with schizophrenia, providing an innovative treatment option that could change how this condition is managed, according to Jelena Kunovac, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the Department of Psychiatry.
“We are overdue for a medication that targets schizophrenia with a different mechanism of action,” Kunovac told ABC News.
The first drugs for schizophrenia, including chlorpromazine and haloperidol – also known by the brand names Thorazine and Haldol, respectively – were introduced in the 1950s and revolutionized treatment of the disease. However, there have been very few new medications since then, with most subsequent FDA approvals being for variations of these older drugs.
Most schizophrenia medications, broadly known as antipsychotics, work by changing dopamine levels, a brain chemical that affects mood, motivation, and thinking, Kunovac explained. Cobenfy takes a different approach by adjusting acetylcholine, another brain chemical that aids memory, learning and attention, she said.
By focusing on acetylcholine instead of dopamine, Cobenfy may reduce schizophrenia symptoms while avoiding common side effects like weight gain, drowsiness and movement disorders, clinical trials suggest. These side effects often become so severe and unpleasant that, in some studies mirroring real-world challenges, many patients stopped treatment within 18 months of starting it.
In clinical trials, only 6% of patients stopped taking Cobenfy due to side effects, noted Dr. Samit Hirawat, chief medical officer at Bristol Myers Squibb. “That’s a significant improvement over the 20-30% seen with older antipsychotic drugs,” he added.
The most common side effects of Cobenfy are nausea, indigestion, constipation, vomiting, hypertension, abdominal pain, diarrhea, increased heart rate, dizziness and gastroesophageal reflux disease, according to the FDA announcement.
“It may prove advantageous to those who don’t tolerate what has been available,” Dr. Leslie Citrome, a clinical professor of psychiatry and expert in psychopharmacology at New York Medical College, told ABC News regarding Cobenfy. “This will provide a new approach that may work out quite nicely.”
Citrome emphasized that patients who have trouble tolerating the side effects of traditional schizophrenia medications may benefit most from Cobenfy, and that a different mechanism of action holds hope for those who have not responded adequately to existing treatments.
Schizophrenia is a mental health disorder that affects about 24 million people worldwide, or roughly one in 300 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It often leads to significant challenges in daily functioning, work, and relationships, impacting both patients and their families.
The disorder typically begins in late adolescence or early adulthood and can lead to lifelong disability if not properly managed, according to the WHO, further highlighting the need for effective treatment options.
Following approval, doctors could start prescribing Cobenfy by the end of October, according to Adam Lenkowsky, executive vice president and chief commercialization officer at Bristol Myers Squibb.
Experts hope that the drug’s unique mechanism and reduced side effects will help set a new standard of care for schizophrenia patients. Studies for additional therapeutic uses, including the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and bipolar disorder, are also underway.
Jake Goodman, MD, MBA is a psychiatry resident physician and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
(NEW YORK) — COVID-19 has significantly fallen as a leading cause of death in the U.S. for the first time since the pandemic began, according to new provisional data published Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In 2023, the virus was the tenth-leading cause of death among Americans, down from the fourth-leading cause in 2022 and the third-leading cause of death between March 2020 and October 2021.
The report also found that overall deaths fell significantly from 2022 to 2023.
The report did not go into reasons for why deaths have fallen, but Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, said likely reasons include the prevention of COVID fatalities through vaccines, treatments for early onset illness and a better overall understanding of the virus.
“Being on the other side of the pandemic played a big part in seeing this overall mortality rate go down,” he said. ‘This is, in large part, related to the public health effort, especially vaccines that, of course, saved so many lives.”
For the report, researchers looked at preliminary death certificate data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System.
In 2023, there were about 3.09 million deaths in the U.S. with an age-adjusted rate of 750.4 deaths per 100,000 people. This is a decrease of 6.1% from the rate of 798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022.
Additionally, death rates were highest among males, older adults and Black Americans, according to the report.
The three leading causes of death in the U.S. were heart disease, cancer and unintentional injury, respectively, which is unchanged from 2022.
Last year marked the first time since the pandemic began that COVID-19 was not one of the top five leading causes of death. Provisional data showed COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 1.6% of all deaths in 2023, decreasing from 5.7% in 2022.
The COVID-19 death rate fell from 58.7 per 100,000 deaths in 2022 to 18.2 per 100,000 in 2023, the report found.
The number of COVID-19-associated deaths fell from 2023 across all age groups and racial/ethnic groups.
Death rates from COVID-19 were highest among those aged 75 and older — highlighting the impact the virus has had on the elderly population. However, the gap between death rates among racial/ethnic groups shrunk from 2022 to 2023.
In 2022, the COVID death rate for white Americans was 58.6 per 100,000 compared to 71.0 per 100,000 for Black Americans. In 2023, the rate was 19.6 per 100,000 for white Americans and 17 per 100,000 for Black Americans.
“Because of the wide disparities that exist in COVID-related deaths, and we know that COVID deaths were not equal across the population, especially hit…Black populations and other and African American people, it’s not surprising that when you overall reduce COVID deaths, that will overall contribute to potentially sort of a closing of the gap,” Brownstein said.
He added that there is more work to be done to close the gap even further, including providing access to health care and insurance for traditionally underserved populations.
Brownstein also said he hopes more efforts can be made to reduce deaths from traditional leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.
“We’ve made a big dent in COVID as a result of response efforts,” he said. “But now there’s still such an important effort to deal with some of these other leading causes of death. These data are important because they can help from an awareness perspective and an allocation of research resources.”