SARS‑CoV‑2 (COVID-19)

[spaminator]

Quebec to stop offering COVID vaccine for free to most people, shots cost up to $180
Author of the article:Canadian Press
Canadian Press
Published Sep 18, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 3 minute read


Quebec is now the second province after Alberta to announce it will no longer offer free doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to its entire population, starting this fall.


The decision matches a similar policy announced by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who said in August her own government would no longer do so as a cost-saving measure.


Quebec’s Health Department said it based its decision on advice from a committee of immunization experts that reports to the province’s public health institute.

It said it’s no longer necessary to offer free doses of the vaccine to healthy adults, since most in the province have now built up an immunity to the virus, either through vaccination, prior infections or both.

“There’s a lot of immunity inside that group,” said Dr. Luc Boileau, Quebec’s national director of public health.

Because of that, he said their risk of having complications if they were to get infected is not very high.


“In fact, it’s going to be very, very low for people that are not in the groups that are at risk,” he said.

Only certain people will remain eligible for subsidized shots this fall in Quebec.

They include those with chronic health conditions, those over 65, those living in long-term care facilities, and health-care workers, the province’s Health Department confirmed.

Quebecers who are pregnant, those who are immunocompromised, and those living in isolated regions will also still be able to get a free shot.

Boileau said if doses of the vaccine are left over after those priority groups receive them, the general population may be given the chance to access them for free.

He said they aren’t suggesting people shouldn’t get vaccinated, but that it should be treated as a personal decision instead, based on one’s own risk factor.


The doctor said the federal government’s decision to stop covering the costs of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in the provinces and territories was another factor in Quebec’s decision.

He said that was expected, since the COVID-19 pandemic was an exceptional situation, and it wasn’t anticipated the federal government would indefinitely foot the costs.

“They are not going to pay and support that financially, which is, I mean their decision, but now we have to cope with that,” Boileau said.

Quebec’s COVID-19 immunization campaign is expected to kick off in early October.

The province will also continue to offer flu shots to general population for free this fall, the department confirmed.

Other provinces that responded to questions from The Canadian Press on Thursday, including Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia, said they were maintaining plans to cover costs for people who wanted the vaccine.


“I think every year we look at what our options are,” said Nova Scotia Health Minister Michelle Thompson. “I don’t think it would be wise or fair of me to predict what’s going to happen next year. This year there is no need for any type of alarm. Our program is not changed.”

Healthy adults in Quebec who still want a dose this fall can pay out of pocket at their local pharmacy.

The province’s association of pharmacist owners said the costs will range between $150 to $180, depending on the rates set by individual pharmacies.

The Alberta government said there were approximately 401,000 unused doses of the vaccine last year, leading to estimated losses of $44 million.

However, the Smith government said it will still make doses of the vaccine free to those that need it most, including those with certain health conditions, and health-care staff.

“We’ll try it this way. This year, we are trying to mitigate costs because it is an expensive intervention,” Smith said last month.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 18, 2025.

Quebec to stop offering COVID vaccine for free to most people, shots cost up to $180

Vaccines against COVID-19 will no longer be free of charge to the general population in Quebec starting this fall.

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[spaminator]

COVID changes sperm in mice, may raise anxiety in offspring: study
Author of the article:AFP
AFP
Published Oct 11, 2025 • 2 minute read

COVID-19 infection causes changes to sperm in mice that may increase anxiety in their offspring, according to Australian researchers.
COVID-19 infection causes changes to sperm in mice that may increase anxiety in their offspring, according to Australian researchers.
SYDNEY — COVID-19 infection causes changes to sperm in mice that may increase anxiety in their offspring, a study released Saturday said, suggesting the pandemic’s possibly long-lasting effects on future generations.


Researchers at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia, infected male mice with the virus that causes COVID, mated them with females, and assessed the impacts on the health of their offspring.


“We found that the resulting offspring showed more anxious behaviours compared to offspring from uninfected fathers,” the study’s first author Elizabeth Kleeman said.

The study — published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications — found that all the offspring from COVID-infected fathers exhibited those changes.

In particular, females showed “significant changes” in the activity of certain genes in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that regulates emotions.


This “may contribute to the increased anxiety we observed in offspring, via epigenetic inheritance and altered brain development,” co-senior author Carolina Gubert said.

The researchers said their work was the first of its kind to show the long-term impact of COVID infection on the behaviour and brain development of later generations.

It found that the virus altered molecules in RNA in the fathers’ sperm, some of which are “involved in the regulation of genes that are known to be important in brain development,” the institute said.

“These findings suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic could have long-lasting effects on future generations,” lead researcher Anthony Hannan said.

But further research was needed, including on whether the same changes occur in people, he added.


“If our findings translate to humans, this could impact millions of children worldwide, and their families, with major implications for public health,” Hannan said.

The COVID pandemic, which took hold in early 2020, is known to have caused more than seven million deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. The true toll is likely far higher.

Both the disease and official responses to it are known to have had deep impacts on mental health globally.

Research has shown that younger people, who were forced into isolation during a key social period of their lives, took the biggest mental health hit.

And a review of around 40 studies across 15 countries, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour in 2023, found that children had still not made up the learning gaps caused by pandemic-era disruptions to their education.

COVID changes sperm in mice, may raise anxiety in offspring: study

COVID-19 infection causes changes to sperm in mice that may increase anxiety in their offspring, a study released Saturday said.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Study finds mRNA coronavirus vaccines prolonged life of cancer patients
Author of the article:Washington Post
Washington Post
Mark Johnson, The Washington Post
Published Oct 23, 2025 • 6 minute read

The study's findings raise hope that scientists may be able to develop a universal vaccine for patients with different cancers.
The study's findings raise hope that scientists may be able to develop a universal vaccine for patients with different cancers.
Covid-19 vaccines, credited with saving millions of lives during the pandemic, set off a powerful alarm that rallies the human immune system against cancer and nearly doubles the median survival length of patients, according to a new retrospective study by researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Florida.


The study examined the records of more than 1,000 MD Anderson patients who had already started approved immunotherapy for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer and melanoma, a type of skin cancer, comparing those who received coronavirus mRNA vaccines with those who had not.


“This data is incredibly exciting, but it needs to be confirmed in a Phase III clinical trial,” said Adam Grippin, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Grippin, who worked on the project while at the University of Florida and is now a radiation oncologist at MD Anderson, said planning for a Phase III clinical trial is underway and organizers hope to begin enrolling patients by the end of the year.

While the findings raise hope that scientists may be able to develop a universal, off-the-shelf vaccine for patients with different cancers, they come at a difficult time for research into vaccines that use messenger RNA.


In August, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the U.S. government was ending almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine development, “because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu.” Scientists have vigorously disputed Kennedy’s contention.

Vaccines that use messenger RNA, a single-stranded molecule, instruct our immune system without actually infecting the body, teaching cells to make a harmless piece of virus protein. Under President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program to fight the covid-19 pandemic, scientists were able to use the mRNA platform to develop vaccines less than a year after the virus was detected. Vaccine development often takes 10 to 15 years.


But mRNA vaccines were by no means a new idea. For more than two decades, scientists had been investigating their use against influenza and cancer.

In the latest study, scientists looked back at almost 900 patients with advanced lung cancer treated at MD Anderson and found that those given covid-19 vaccines within 100 days of starting cancer immunotherapy experienced median survival of 37.3 months compared with 20.6 months for those who were not vaccinated. Patients with melanoma that had spread also showed improved median survival when they were vaccinated.

The immunotherapy – called immune checkpoint treatment – works by releasing a brake that prevents an excessive immune response from killing healthy cells. Releasing that brake allows white blood cells called T cells to attack cancer.


Asked for response to the new study, the Department of Health and Human Services released a statement saying: “The risk-benefit of Covid vaccination in people under age 65 is most favourable for those who are at an increased risk for severe COVID-19, including groups like the advanced cancer patients analyzed in this hypothesis. We terminated 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data showed they failed to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID.”

Precisely why the mRNA vaccines proved so effective in awakening the body’s immune system to the presence of cancer isn’t yet clear, but it may have something to do with RNA’s fundamental role in the evolution of life.

“RNA preceded DNA evolutionarily, so cells don’t like RNA from the outside world coming in,” said Elias Sayour, one of the authors of the new paper and a pediatric oncologist at University of Florida Health. “So when that happens, that sets off all the alarms of the human body. The 911 signals we’re in trouble.”


Grippin had worked in Sayour’s University of Florida lab until 2019; he joined MD Anderson in July 2021.

Scientists at both institutions followed up the examination of the MD Anderson patient records by experimenting in the lab with mouse models, and they found that when immunotherapy treatment was used with mRNA vaccination, the combination slowed tumour growth.

“It is not unexpected. You can expect that more data will come out,” said Katalin Kariko, the University of Pennsylvania researcher who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine with Drew Weissman for work that led to the development of the coronavirus vaccines.

Kariko, who was not involved in the new study, said that in May she was in Europe speaking with other scientists “and they mentioned that the covid vaccine has an effect on cancer growth.” There are about 150 clinical trials of mRNA vaccines ongoing around the world, Kariko said, almost half for treatment of infectious diseases and many of the others for cancers.


“People are trying and they can see it is easy. It is cheap and very quickly you can proceed,” she said. “It will advance and it will benefit the patient.”

Jeff Coller, a professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University who was also not involved in the Nature paper, said mRNA has been viewed as a promising cancer treatment because “it’s a natural product of the human body. Your mRNA is made by the body millions of times per day, and it’s incredibly adaptable.”

He added that mRNA “is very easy to work with, develop, manufacture and change as needed. No other medical therapeutic is this adaptable.” As an example, he pointed out that the day after scientists determined the genomic sequence of the virus SARS-CoV-2, researchers were able to design an mRNA vaccine against it, though it took months longer before vaccines were approved and put into use.


Grippin said the path toward the latest discovery began in 2016 when he and other scientists were experimenting with a vaccine specifically tailored for the brain tumours of individual patients.

“We ran an experiment designed to show how important it was that we make a new vaccine” to match the specific makeup of each tumour. The shock came when they examined the response of the control vaccines.

Although the control vaccines were completely unrelated to the tumour’s composition, they showed a remarkable immune response.

“It was the exact opposite of what we had expected to happen,” Grippin said. “But it opened the door to the possibility that we could design a universal vaccine that could be used to train any patient’s immune system to kill their cancer.”


After billions of doses of mRNA vaccines were administered to fight the covid-19 pandemic, scientists had an opportunity to see how they affected cancer patients.

Grippin and Steven H. Lin, a radiation oncologist at MD Anderson, launched the retrospective study of patients treated between 2015 and 2023 to determine whether those who received coronavirus vaccines lived longer.

The fact that the vaccines need not be individually tailored for a patient is especially significant. Making personalized cancer vaccines would require conducting a biopsy on a patient’s tumour and analyzing its genetic makeup, a process that would take months.

Sayour and other scientists said they hoped the new study will lead the Trump administration to reconsider the halt on mRNA vaccine development.


“Few things have been tested as comprehensively as the covid-19 mRNA vaccine,” Sayour said.

“I’m not saying this is the cure for cancer, okay? I’m saying that this is a tool, a tool that can allow us to markedly improve the response to immunotherapy we’re currently seeing. I mean, every day hundreds of cancer patients are dying despite checkpoint inhibitors.”

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute and multiple foundations.

Study finds mRNA coronavirus vaccines prolonged life of cancer patients

The study examined the records of more than 1,000 MD Anderson patients.

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