Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sept. 5 that officials were likely to soon get the regulatory go-ahead to administer Covid-19 vaccine booster shots made by Pfizer, although the Moderna booster could take a little longer.

A White House plan to offer Covid-19 booster shots will most likely start during September only with the vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech, a narrower initiative than anticipated, a source familiar with the matter said on Sept. 3.

As cases of the Delta variant continue to raise concerns across the United States, a new variant reaches a warning level for the World Health Organization.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said on Aug. 29 he supports Covid-19 vaccine mandates for children attending schools as the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus continues to fuel a surge in cases in the nation.

The number of coronavirus patients in U.S. hospitals breached 100,000, the highest level in eight months, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, as a resurgence of Covid-19 spurred by the highly contagious Delta variant strains the nation’s health care system.

Early data from a Phase III study of Brii Biosciences’ monoclonal antibody combination therapy for Covid-19 is showing significant promise.

The United States could get Covid-19 under control by early 2022, with potential wider vaccine approvals coming in the weeks ahead, Dr. Anthony Fauci said one day after Pfizer won wider FDA approval for the company’s novel coronavirus shot on Aug. 23.

The continued spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has spawned a Greek alphabet of variants – a naming system used by the World Health Organization to track concerning new mutations of the virus that causes Covid-19. Some have equipped the virus with better ways of infecting humans or evading vaccine protection.

The Delta variant of the coronavirus is the cause of more than 80 percent of new U.S. Covid-19 cases, but the authorized vaccines remain more than 90 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths, said top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci during a U.S. Senate hearing on July 20.

The next Covid pandemic could be prevented by using a gene drive to preemptively edit the genome of bats to prevent them from becoming hosts for coronaviruses, according to a proposal by scientists from Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzelia and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).