New data released by the CDC shows who omicron is impacting.

Of 43 cases reported the first week of December:

• 58% were young people between 18 and 39 years old.
• 79% were vaccinated, including 14 people who received a booster dose.
• 16% had been infected with COVID-19 before.
• 33% had traveled internationally
• 1 person, who is vaccinated, was hospitalized

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7050e1.htm

HOUSTON — It’s been one week since the first case of the omicron variant was detected in the Houston area. Now it makes up 15% of positive COVID cases at Houston Methodist.

The Houston Health Department said Monday the omicron variant has now been found in 25 of the city's 39 wastewater treatment plants.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/cdc-79-percent-omicron-vaccinated/285-c4a5c9e4-118d-4b54-8a62-e4c0723d68dd

ADE a Non-Issue With COVID Vaccines

Scientists say that ADE is pretty much a non-issue with COVID-19 vaccines, but what are they basing this on?

From the early stages of COVID-19 vaccine development, scientists sought to target a SARS-CoV-2 protein that was least likely to cause ADE. For example, when they found out that targeting the nucleoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 might cause ADE, they quickly abandoned that approach. The safest route seemed to be targeting the S2 subunit of the spike protein, and they ran with that, wrote Derek Lowe, PhD, in his Science Translational Medicine blog "In the Pipeline."

Scientists designed animal studies to look for ADE. They looked for it in human trials, and they've been looking for it in the real-world data for COVID-19 vaccines with emergency use authorization. So far, they haven't seen signs of it. In fact, the opposite is happening, Lowe noted.

"[W]hat seems to be beyond doubt is that the vaccinated subjects, over and over, show up with no severe coronavirus cases and no hospitalizations. That is the opposite of what you would expect if ADE were happening," he wrote.

Furthermore, ADE is an acute problem, and it can be very dramatic. If it was an issue with these vaccines, we would have spotted it by now, said Brian Lichty, PhD, an associate professor in pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University in Toronto.

"It'll kill you quickly. In all the places I'm aware of ADE happening, it is an acute, mostly cytokine-driven event," he told MedPage Today.

The one exception may be an inactivated whole-cell, or "killed," vaccine developed by China. That vaccine uses alum, the same adjuvant that was used in the measles and RSV vaccines that caused ADE in the 1960s. The Chinese inactivated whole-cell vaccine could "conceivably" generate ADE like those older vaccines, according to Bloom.

"I don't think that vaccine is ever going to see the light of day in the U.S., and it may not even be worth mentioning. There have been no actual cases of ADE with the Chinese whole-cell killed vaccine, or if so, it hasn't been reported," he said.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/91648