The new Covid-19 vaccines

The CDC has rolled out new updated Covid vaccines, redesigned to be more effective against the two Omicron variants. This hour, we’ll tell you what you need to know about the new shots, when and who should get them. We’ll also discuss Covid treatments, the science of long Covid and more. JOHN WHERRY, Director of the Institute of Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania and PETER CHIN-HONG, University of California, San Francisco infectious disease physician join us to answer all Covid-related questions.

But first, we’ll start the hour discussing the new life expectancy data from the CDC. American’s mortality dropped sharply for the second year — from 79 years in 2019, to 76 in 2021 — the biggest decline in a century. Native American and Alaskan Native people saw the steepest loss. While Covid obviously played a large role in the backward trend, other developing countries didn’t see their life expectancy drop significantly. We’ll talk with ANA DIEZ ROUX, Dean of Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, about what this tells us about our healthcare, the inequities in our society, and the policies that could move us forward.

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Associated Press, EXPLAINER: Should you get a new COVID booster? If so, when? – “John Wherry will wait until later in the fall to consider getting an updated COVID-19 booster. The University of Pennsylvania immunologist knows it’s too soon after his shot late this summer, especially since he’s not at high risk from the virus.”

The New York Times, U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback – “The decline during the pandemic is the sharpest in nearly 100 years, hitting Native American and Alaska Native communities particularly hard.”