Los Angeles Times: Child Infected With Monkeypox In Orange County
Orange County health officials this week confirmed the county’s first case of monkeypox in a child, a rare circumstance even as the virus continues to spread statewide. “Please remember that monkeypox is very uncommon in children,” said Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, Orange County’s health officer. “It is important to note that many childhood illnesses can cause rashes. If you or your children have a new or unusual rash, please follow preventive guidance and seek medical attention from a qualified healthcare professional for further recommendations.” (Toohey, 8/25)

The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat: Rancho Cotate High Student Tests Positive For Monkeypox
A Rancho Cotate High School student has tested positive this week for monkeypox. The positive determination was announced Thursday afternoon in an email to parents of students in the Cotati-Rohnert Park Unified School District. (Atagi, 8/25)

Los Angeles Times: Monkeypox Cases Begin To Slow In L.A. County
New monkeypox cases are starting to flatten in Los Angeles County, echoing a trend seen elsewhere as more vaccination doses are distributed and some people are reducing riskier sexual activity. As of Thursday, L.A. County reported 1,349 cumulative monkeypox cases, up 30% from the prior Thursday’s tally of 1,036 cases. (Toohey, Lin II and Money, 8/25)

CapRadio: Sacramento School Districts Waiting For Guidance On Monkeypox As School Year Starts
With the summer coming to an end, kids are starting to return to classrooms. While some COVID-19 pandemic guidelines are still in effect, many Sacramento-area schools don’t currently have any measures that address monkeypox. Though both the state of California and Sacramento County announced a state of emergency in response to the ongoing monkeypox outbreak in early August, neither has yet issued guidelines for how schools should address potential spread of the virus. (Salanga, 8/25)

Los Angeles Times: MPX? Mpox? The Struggle To Replace ‘Monkeypox’ With A Name That Isn’t Racist
Some people argue that the name is racist and disparages an entire continent. Others view it as offensive to gay men. And then there are those who fear it could lead to indiscriminate killing of monkeys, as happened in Brazil. All that menace from one word: monkeypox. (Mejia, 8/26)

Bloomberg: Monkeypox Virus Mushrooms Into Global Contagion In Just Four Months
From just a handful of infections in early May, monkeypox has escalated into a global public health emergency, with more than 45,000 cases scattered across 100 or more countries, mostly in Europe and North America. (Gale and Pong, 8/26)

The Hill: Fauci Compares Monkeypox Outbreak To HIV Epidemic, Advises Against Making The Same Assumptions
The White House’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci advised against making the same assumptions about the current monkeypox outbreak that were made during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fauci and H. Clifford Lane, deputy director for clinical research and special projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday in which they reflected on the similarities between the monkeypox outbreak and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which both men spent much of their careers studying. (Choi, 8/25)

New England Journal of Medicine: Monkeypox — Past As Prologue 
If one compares the situations at the start of the AIDS, Covid-19, and current global monkeypox outbreaks, certain interesting similarities and differences are apparent. (H. Clifford Lane, MD, and Anthony S. Fauci, MD, 8/25)

Times of San Diego: COVID Hospitalizations Slip While County Reports Nearly 2,000 New Infections 
San Diego County’s Health and Human Services Agency reported nearly 2,000 new COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the week and three more deaths. (8/25)

CIDRAP: Study: Two COVID-19 Rapid Tests Accurately Diagnose Variant Infections
Two COVID-19 rapid antigen tests produce accurate results for infections with the SARS-COV-2 pre-Delta, Delta, and Omicron strains, finds a study yesterday in JAMA Network Open. University of Washington and University of Nevada researchers tested 797 adults who had symptoms characteristic of COVID-19 within the previous 5 days. They assessed the SCoV-2 Ag Detect Rapid Self-Test and BinaxNow COVID-19 Ag Card at multiple sites in King County, Washington. Testing was done from Feb 17, 2021, to Jan 11, 2022. Average participant age was 37.3 years, 58.2% were women, and 52.9% were unvaccinated. (8/25)

CIDRAP: WHO: COVID Deaths For 2022 Pass 1 Million Worldwide
At a World Health Organization (WHO) briefing today, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, said COVID-19 deaths for 2022 alone passed 1 million this week, as he pressed countries to do more to vaccinate all healthcare workers, older people, and others at highest risk. Since the pandemic began in early 2020, 6,472,848 deaths have been reported, according to the Johns Hopkins online dashboard. Tedros said countries in Africa with the lowest rates are making progress with vaccine coverage, and many countries are making good strides in targeting high-priority groups. He said, however, that one third of the world is still unvaccinated, including two thirds of health workers and three quarters of older adults in low-income countries. (8/25)

NBC News: Long Covid May Be Keeping Up To 4 Million People Out Of Work, Research Suggests
Up to 4 million people may be out of work because of long Covid in the U.S, according to a report published this week by the Brookings Institution. In lost wages, that could add up to at least $170 billion per year, the report suggests. (Bendix, 8/25)

Bloomberg: Dr. Anthony Fauci Expected Covid To Be ‘Behind Us’ A Year Into Biden’s Term
White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci expected the US would have moved past the Covid-19 pandemic after the first year of the Biden administration, but the disruption from the virus has lingered longer than the infectious disease expert anticipated. (Baumann and Tozzi, 8/25)

The Washington Post: Moderna Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Pfizer And BioNTech Over Coronavirus Vaccine
Moderna sued Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech on Friday, alleging the rival firms improperly used its foundational technology in developing their coronavirus vaccine. The suit sets up a legal battle between the most prominent companies that helped curb the coronavirus pandemic in the United States by developing highly effective shots in record time. “We believe that Pfizer and BioNTech unlawfully copied Moderna’s inventions, and they have continued to use them without permission,” Moderna Chief Legal Officer Shannon Thyme Klinger said in a company news release. The company said it filed suits in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts and in Germany, where BioNTech is headquartered. (Rowland, 8/26)

San Francisco Chronicle: Fewer Than 15,000 Novavax Shots Have Been Given In U.S.
The U.S. has administered 14,559 of its 626,900 available doses of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine since the shots were cleared for use in mid-July, according to data published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Vaziri, 8/25)

San Francisco Chronicle: ‘This Is What Equity Looks Like’: Roving Teams Deliver COVID Vaccines Around The Tenderloin
Nicole Parks squinted and aimed her syringe just above the cross tattoo on Elogosha Adorn’s beefy arm. Adorn twisted awkwardly on his bus bench to check what she was doing, causing the sleeve of his sweatshirt to flop down over the tattoo. Parks jerked the needle back. Adorn pounded his thigh with his right hand, which happened to be filled with the gear he was about to light up for a hit of fentanyl. “Want me to do that myself?” he growled. “No, I got it,” Parks said quietly. A UCSF registered nurse, she’s good at gauging her moment. She waited a few seconds for him to settle, then quickly slid up the sweatshirt sleeve. (Fagan, 8/25)

Bay Area News Group: Q&A: The New COVID Vaccine Booster Is Coming. Should You Get It?
The COVID vaccine is getting an upgrade. For two years, we’ve been protecting ourselves with a vaccine modeled after the original version of the virus. But soon after Labor Day, a new booster – call it vaccine 2.0 — will be available to every adult in the U.S. (Krieger, 8/26)

Sacramento Bee: A 3-Month Strike At Kaiser? Insurer Prepares For Worst In CA
Kaiser Permanente is looking to contract with therapists who can help it survive at least three months of a strike by its mental health clinicians, luring potential recruits with promises of lucrative signing bonuses and pay premiums. Licensed marriage and family therapist Sally Levy Albert said she resigned from the Kaiser network in March 2022 but received the offer in an email. In it, a Kaiser employee wrote: “We have a need to secure continued access to outpatient mental health services for our members over the next eight to 10 weeks as we work through contract negotiations currently underway with” the union representing mental health clinicians. (Anderson, 8/26)

The Bakersfield Californian: UnitedHealthcare Donates $290K To Local Nonprofits 
UnitedHealthcare, a UnitedHealth Group company, gave almost $300,000 to a pair of nonprofits that serve Kern County residents, according to a UnitedHealthcare news release. (8/25)

Noticias Telemundo: California's Health Care Coverage Expansion Benefits Undocumented Young Adults
California will extend health coverage through next year for about 40,000 low-income, undocumented young adults who are at risk of losing coverage under the state’s Medicaid program.  Beatriz Hernandez, 26, who immigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, when she was 12, qualifies for the extended benefit. “This is amazing. I’m happy,” she said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. The new policy announced Monday by the state’s Department of Health Care Services resolves the gap by guaranteeing continuous coverage for young people until the end of 2023. Hernandez is one of them. (Subizar, 8/25)

Fresno Bee: Fresno Officials Say 9 Residents Positive For West Nile
Fresno County Health Department officials Thursday reported that nine residents have tested positive for West Nile virus so far in 2022. (Guy, 8/25)

Fresno Bee: Fresno County’s Extreme Heat Temperatures Affecting Health
Under the overhang of an apartment complex on the border of Fresno and Calwa, Guillermo Hernandez and two neighbors sat beside a small garden where he grows Cat Paw, a plant he uses as an herbal remedy for cancer. It was 4 p.m. and 100 degrees. (Garibay, 8/26)

Los Angeles Times: In California Wildfires, Risk Of Death Increases With Age
Ronald Tyra knew it was time to flee when the 100-acre blaze across the street began igniting spot fires as it raced down the mountain. Tyra sped from his Klamath River, Calif., home with little more than the clothes on his back. His neighbors — Charles Kays, 79, and his wife, Judith, 82 — were not so lucky. Only recently identified by authorities, their bodies were found in a burned vehicle near the bottom of their driveway. They apparently had rammed a locked gate attempting to escape and veered off the road, officials said. (Wigglesworth, 8/26)

NBC News: Pfizer's RSV Vaccine Protects Against Severe Illness In Older Adults
Pfizer’s experimental vaccine for a respiratory virus called RSV was nearly 86% effective in preventing severe illness in a late-stage clinical trial of older adults, the company announced in a release Thursday. (Lovelace Jr., 8/25)

Reuters: Pfizer's RSV Vaccine Found Effective, Safe Among Older Adults In Study 
The vaccine, RSVpreF, was also found to be well-tolerated with no safety concerns in the study. Pfizer's shot is designed to target two strains of the respiratory virus. The company has so far enrolled about 37,000 participants aged 60 and above in its late-stage global study of the vaccine. (8/25)

Stat: Pfizer's Experimental RSV Vaccine Protects Older Adults In Study
Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called the data exciting. “This vaccine will be of enormous benefit to the elderly in preventing severe and occasionally fatal respiratory tract infections,” Offit predicted. “The vaccine will also be important as a maternal vaccine to protect babies in the first six months of life.” (Herper, 8/25)

Self: Here’s Why Pfizer’s RSV Vaccine for Adults Is a Pretty Big Deal
Each year, about 177,000 older adults are hospitalized due to RSV infection in the US, and 14,000 of these infections lead to death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “RSV is a major burden of illness in elderly or immunocompromised adults,” Amesh A. Adalja, MD, infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells SELF. Currently, there is only a monoclonal antibody injection, called Synagis, that is used to reduce the risk of severe RSV illness in some high-risk babies. But the FDA has not yet approved an RSV vaccine for adults, so Pfizer’s option is on its way to becoming the first to get there. (Miller, 8/25)

The Chronicle for Higher Education: ‘A Historic Moment’: New Guidance Requires Federally Funded Research To Be Open Access
In a move hailed by open-access advocates, the White House on Thursday released guidance dictating that federally funded research be made freely and immediately available to the public. The Office of Science and Technology Policy’s guidance calls for federal agencies to make taxpayer-supported research publicly available immediately, doing away with an optional 12-month embargo. (Zahneis, 8/25)

The New York Times: White House Pushes Journals To Drop Paywalls On Publicly Funded Research 
In laying out the new policy, which is set to be fully in place by the start of 2026, the Office of Science and Technology Policy said that the guidance had the potential to save lives and benefit the public on several key priorities — from cancer breakthroughs to clean-energy technology. “The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually,” Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of the office, said in a statement. “There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research.” (Patel, 8/25)

Stat: White House Directs Agencies To Make Federally Funded Studies Free
“The devil’s in the details,” said New England Journal of Medicine Editor-in-Chief Eric Rubin, who told STAT at least a third of the journal’s estimated 200 articles a year are attached to federal funding, though other funding streams do require open access. “It does threaten the model of a carefully thought-out presentation and carefully getting research. We’re gonna have to think about how we can still do what we think is important.” (Owermohle, 8/25)

Palm Springs Desert Sun: Monkeypox Won’t Remain An 'MSM Disease' Indefinitely, So Let's Stop Treating It That Way
The world is currently experiencing by far the largest ever epidemic of human monkeypox, and the United States is disproportionately affected, accounting for 16,500 of the 46,000 confirmed cases globally.  Monkeypox is a disease with a long incubation period, so it will take time to turn it around — we need to treat it with urgency, now. (Andrew Lover and Andrew Noymer, 8/26)

San Francisco Chronicle: Political Cowardice Wins The Day In California, Again, On Supervised Drug Sites
On Monday afternoon, in a move widely seen as politically protective of his future presidential ambitions, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB57, which would have established safe drug consumption site pilot programs in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles. (8/22)

San Francisco Chronicle: Politics Influenced Gavin Newsom’s Decision To Veto Supervised Drug-Use Sites. But Not In The Way You Think
Critics are furious at Gov. Gavin Newsom for vetoing a pilot program that would have allowed San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles to open supervised drug consumption sites as a way to curb California’s overdose crisis. Some say Newsom spiked the controversial program to spare his reputation as he climbs the political ladder. (Joe Garofoli, 8/23)

Fresno Bee: Newsom’s CARE Court Mental HealthPlan Is Flawed But Has Merit. California Needs It To Work
With almost universal support in the California Legislature to date, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court proposal appears to be barreling toward enactment. (8/19)

CalMatters: CARE Court Plan Gets Backing From San Diego Cities, County 
California has a fragmented, inadequate mental health care response system, for which no single government entity is in charge of guaranteeing that people grappling with severe mental illness get care. Our society’s efforts to deal with this human tragedy have been a failure. We nee/d a new approach. (Todd Gloria and Nathan Fletcher, 8/24)

East Bay Times: Abortion Ballot Measure Isn't Worth The Risk For Californians
The Mercury News Editorial Board recently wrote that Prop 1 is needed to “protect women’s reproductive rights.” But those rights are already guaranteed under California law, including the right to abortion and contraception, and are not threatened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Roe v. Wade ruling. (Christopher J. Bakes, 8/24)

Los Angeles Daily News: Sacramento Should Withdraw Proposition 1 To Specify Post-Viability Abortion Limits 
In November, Californians will vote on Proposition 1, which would amend the California Constitution to read: “The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.” (Tom Campbell, 8/20)

Fresno Bee: Fresno Hospital Leaders Prioritized Personal Interests Over Patients. They Should Resign
In countless ways, the importance of Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno cannot be overstated. It forms a landmark constellation of buildings in the heart of Fresno. Its large workforce is an economic driver downtown, and CRMC operates the highest-level trauma center from Sacramento to Los Angeles. It is also where most of the people living in Fresno’s low-income neighborhoods south of Shaw Avenue get medical help. (8/25)

Fresno Bee: From The Editor: How We Reported The Four-Part Investigation Of Community Medical Centers
Over the last decade, Community Medical Centers has pumped approximately $1 billion into expanding its suburban Clovis hospital campus. But has that investment come at yet another cost to Fresno – and, in particular, the often impoverished patients who rely on its downtown Fresno hospital? (Joe Kieta, 8/25)

Los Angeles Daily News: Third Try At Dialysis Clinic Meddling Is Just As Bad As The First Two Attempts 
California voters will be blinking and experiencing a sense of déjà vu when they see Proposition 29 on their fall ballots, a third attempt by a powerful labor union to meddle in the operation of dialysis clinics. (Thomas D. Elias, 8/22)

San Diego Union-Tribune: Yes On California Proposition 29: This Measure Would Protect Dialysis Patients’ Lives 
Proposition 29 on the Nov. 8 ballot would make California dialysis clinics have certain reporting requirements, ownership disclosures and at least one physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant on-site while patients are being treated. (Carmen Cartagena, 8/24)

Dallas Morning News: Health Improves When Basic Needs Are Met
It seems obvious to say that people do better in life when they have better access to health care and other services. But developing the data of just how much impact this can have is critical to understanding where and how to make public investments in providing health care. For Parkland Hospital and other health care providers, some of that data is coming now, and it’s dramatic. (8/24)