More of Pima County’s children and teens will be ditching masks in school following recent changes in county and federal guidelines. Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, associate professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, is quoted.

President Biden, looking to usher the nation out of the coronavirus crisis into what some are calling a “new normal,” used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to sketch out the next phase of his pandemic response. Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson, is quoted.

It’s called the Aegis Consortium and the goal is to partner with experts across disciplines to create a pandemic-free future. One area of research will look at how where we live can be adapted or modified with technology. Mindy Fain, MD, co-director of the UArizona Center on Aging and professor of medicine in the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson, is quoted. The Health Sciences Office of Communications assisted with this story.

The district will still apply certain masking and quarantine mandates for those who test positive for COVID-19 or for those who come in direct contact with an infected person. Other county school districts are still deciding what to do. Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, associate professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, is quoted.

Five months after immunization, two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appeared to offer virtually no defense against moderate illness caused by the omicron variant — as measured by visits to emergency departments and urgent care clinics — among adolescents aged 12 to 17 years, according to data published by the CDC. Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, professor of immunobiology at the College of Medicine – Tucson, is quoted.

Arizona has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Certainly we can look to Texas and Florida and go, gosh, how did we beat them?" said Joe Gerald, MD, PhD, associate professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

The Arizona Department of Health Services wants to know who has the desire and credentials to do human studies on whether marijuana can treat health conditions such as autism. Tally Largent-Milnes, PhD, assistant professor of pharmacology in the College of Medicine – Tucson, wants to someday learn if cannabis can treat migraines. “Until we are able to run these clinical trials in a well-thought out manner, we’re never going to know the answer,” she said.

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech is much less effective in preventing infection in children ages 5 to 11 years than in older adolescents or adults, according to a large new set of data collected by health officials in New York. Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the UArizona College of Medicine – Tucson, is quoted.