Public health measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic were essential for limiting viral transmission but had unintended consequences for children's movement behaviours, including reduced physical activity, increased sedentary time, and disruptions to sleep. These behaviours are fundamental to healthy physical, mental, and social development and were already suboptimal for many children prior to the pandemic. This commentary draws on findings from a rapid global scoping review of 182 studies conducted across 48 countries between 2020 and 2023 and reflects the consensus position of an international group of movement behaviour researchers. Using qualitative evidence synthesis and narrative analysis, the review examined reported changes in children's movement behaviours and identified commonly proposed strategies to mitigate harms during public health emergencies. Across diverse geographic and economic contexts, studies consistently described declines in physical activity and increases in sedentary time, alongside variable impacts on sleep. Recommended responses most frequently emphasized education, environmental restructuring, enablement, and policy and service-level actions aimed at supporting healthy movement opportunities during periods of restriction. Collectively, the evidence suggests that children's movement behaviours were insufficiently considered within emergency response planning and were often treated as secondary outcomes rather than essential determinants of child health. We argue that protecting opportunities for physical activity, active play, and healthy daily movement should be embedded within pandemic recovery and future emergency preparedness efforts. Recognizing movement behaviours as a core component of resilient public health systems may help mitigate unintended harms and better safeguard child health and well-being during future crises.

Specialist immunization clinics can support vaccination counseling for individuals experiencing adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) and research into AEFIs. We sought to describe the experiences of participants from the Canadian Special Immunization Clinic Network COVID-19 vaccine safety study. Qualitative interviews were conducted about participants' experiences with COVID-19 vaccination, developing an AEFI, and enrolling in a research study. Interviews were analyzed using interpretive descriptive methods guided by the socio-ecological model. Three women and five men, ages 22-59 y, were interviewed. After experiencing AEFIs, participants largely continued to trust in science and COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, though some felt they had not been adequately informed about the potential risks of COVID-19 vaccination. They also reported hesitation from healthcare providers to attribute their symptoms to the vaccine and difficulty accessing care for their AEFI. While participants expressed a desire to assist research efforts into AEFIs, challenges included complicated consent procedures and apprehensions regarding privacy. Improving diagnosis and care of individuals with AEFIs and strengthening research efforts will require changes at organizational and policy levels, including enhanced clinician training on AEFIs and simplifying research consent processes, as well as individual and community-level interventions to tailor communication and strengthen interactions between clinicians and vaccine recipients.

COVID-19 disrupted early reading development, especially for under-resourced students. Few studies have evaluated early reading skill recovery after the return to in-person instruction. This study tracked reading achievement among 236,701 kindergarten through second-grade students from the academic year 2019-2020 to 2023-2024 (48.7% female; 69.8% Latine). Children had lower reading performance and less growth during remote instruction (2020-2021) compared with the pre-COVID cohort. Reading scores improved once in-person learning resumed. Kindergarten students who experienced remote instruction during COVID-19 demonstrated reading achievement recovery by the second grade. We also assessed if increased school-level (N = 467) support services were related to reading skill growth. Results demonstrated that early reading skill recovery is possible after mass disruptions.

The evolution of SARS-CoV-2 necessitates next-generation vaccine strategies targeting conserved viral elements to ensure broad and durable protection. In this study, we designed and evaluated novel mRNA-based vaccines encoding conserved domains of SARS-CoV-2, including the spike S2 subunit, NSP3 Macrodomain I (Mac I), and papain-like protease (PLpro). These mRNAs were synthesized, cloned, and encapsulated into lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) with 70%-80% efficiency and favorable physicochemical properties. In vitro characterization showed efficient antigen expression with 60%-80% cell survival. Immunization of BALB/c mice induced strong humoral responses, particularly against S2 and Mac I, marked by IgG titers, class switching, and durable antibody presence up to 84 days post-booster. PLpro elicited minimal antibody responses, likely due to limited stability or intrinsic low immunogenicity. Combinatorial LNPs encoding multiple antigens maintained robust expression and elicited comparable immune responses despite dose splitting. Anti-S2 antibodies effectively inhibited spike protein uptake in vitro. Importantly, the selected antigenic regions exhibited high sequence conservation across major SARS-CoV-2 variants, underscoring their broad-spectrum vaccine potential. These findings support further development of domain-targeted, multi-antigen mRNA vaccines to enhance cross-variant protection and T-cell-mediated immunity.

A sensitive and validated liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method was developed for the simultaneous quantification of the anti-COVID-19 agents molnupiravir (MPV), its active metabolite N-hydroxycytidine (NHC), and baricitinib (BARI) in human plasma. As MPV is rapidly converted to NHC in vivo, whereas BARI is predominantly eliminated unchanged, NHC was generated in vitro by alkaline hydrolysis to enable accurate determination of the active metabolite. Chromatographic separation was achieved on an Agilent Poroshell 120 EC-C18 column using methanol and 0.1% formic acid in water (90:10, v/v). Escitalopram was selected as the internal standard owing to its consistent extraction recovery, and satisfactory chromatographic performance. Plasma samples were prepared by liquid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate, yielding recoveries of 87.5-91.6% for MPV, 87.5-89.4% for NHC, and 87.9-94.9% for BARI. The method was validated according to FDA bioanalytical guidelines over concentration ranges of 20-500, 20-10.000, and 20-500 ng/mL for MPV, NHC, and BARI, respectively. Accuracy, precision, stability, recovery, carryover, and matrix effect met the acceptance criteria. Normalized matrix factors for MPV, NHC, and BARI ranged from 0.948-0.984, 0.900-0.902, and 0.912-1.014, respectively, with CV values below 1%, indicating negligible matrix interference. The proposed method provides a reliable analytical tool for future pharmacokinetic and therapeutic drug monitoring studies.

This chapter describes the applications of the fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method to analyzing the protein-protein interactions (PPIs). Employing the protein complexes related to influenza virus, measles virus, SARS-CoV-2 and HER2, the intermolecular interactions between amino acid residues are quantitatively evaluated. Recent advances in computational methodology, such as the systematic identification of interaction hotspots, the incorporation of conformational fluctuations and the clustering-based statistical averaging are addressed.

Epidemic models are invaluable tools to understand and implement strategies to control the spread of infectious diseases, as well as to inform public health policies and resource allocation. However, current modeling approaches have limitations that reduce their practical utility, such as the exclusion of human behavioral change in response to the epidemic or ignoring the presence of undetected infectious individuals in the population. These limitations became particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the need for more accurate and informative models. To address these challenges, we develop a novel Bayesian epidemic modeling framework to better capture the complexities of disease spread by incorporating behavioral responses and undetected infections. In particular, our framework makes three contributions: (1) leveraging additional data on hospitalizations and deaths in modeling the disease dynamics, (2) accounting for data uncertainty arising from the large presence of asymptomatic and undetected infections, and (3) allowing the population behavioral change to be dynamically influenced by multiple data sources (cases and deaths). We thoroughly investigate the properties of the proposed model via simulation, and illustrate its utility on COVID-19 data from Montréal and Miami.

A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) within the human interferon lambda 1 (IFN-L1, IFN-λ1) gene promoter, rs7247086 (C/T) has been reported to be associated with severe dengue and possibly with psoriasis and COVID-19. However, its functional nature is unknown. The present study was undertaken to examine the effect of rs7247086 on transcription, by utilizing promoter and enhancer-reporter assays. We see that the T allele completes a consensus signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT)-binding site. While we did not find strong evidence to show that the STAT-binding site drove transcription from the IFNL1 gene promoter, we saw that it acts like an enhancer in reporter assays. The T allele of rs7247086 within the STAT-binding site significantly increased transcription of the reporter gene compared to the C allele when incorporated into enhancer-reporter constructs in both HEK293 and A549 cell lines. Mechanistically, we obtained evidence from electrophoretic mobility shift assays to show that the T allele binds to STAT proteins more strongly than the C allele. In a cohort of healthy individuals, we saw that the T allele carriers, specifically males but not females, had significantly increased secretion of IFN-λ1 from their peripheral blood mononuclear cells after stimulation. Lastly, rs7247086 significantly associated with psoriasis, only in males but not in females.