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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced updates to its COVID-19 vaccination recommendations today, as the U.S. population has grown tired of the current policy.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than 25% of Americans received boosters yearly over the past two seasons.
Even healthcare workers are hesitant about vaccination, with less than one-third participating in the 2023–2024 fall booster program.

Training the immune system to produce antibodies targeting many virus variants has been a decades-long scientific challenge in HIV vaccine development.
Announced on May 15, 2025, a new study published in Science combining data from two separate phase 1 clinical trials shows that a targeted vaccine strategy can successfully activate early immune responses relevant to HIV, and, in one trial, further advance them—a key step toward a long-sought goal in vaccine development.

Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), the causative agent of Japanese encephalitis (JE), affected an estimated 69,000 individuals in 2024.
Although JE is vaccine-preventable, it remains endemic in 24 countries and territories across Asia and Oceania, where it has a mortality rate of about 20%.
Since its identification in Japan in 1871, the transmission cycle of JEV has involved pigs and birds as amplifying hosts and mosquitoes as vectors.

In the United States, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) develops recommendations on how to use vaccines to control disease. Once adopted, these ACIP recommendations become the official policy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As of May 15, 2025, the CDC published a user-friendly listing of the last five ACIP meeting recommendations.

Last week, the U.S. government announced two essential updates to alert international travelers to various Chikungunya outbreaks in the Indian Ocean and expanded vaccination options.
The Health and Human Services Secretary recently adopted the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices' vaccine recommendations for specific people traveling or residing in a country or territory with a risk of the mosquito-transmitted Chikungunya virus.

Since the Zika virus disease (ZIKV) was first identified in 1947, outbreaks have often occurred in 92 countries around the world, adversely affecting the health of adults, children, and even unborn infants.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this mosquito-transmitted virus will continue to be a health risk for years.
Researchers estimate that mosquitoes are carrying the Zika virus into new regions, and approximately 1.3 billion people could be affected by Zika by the year 2050.