The Covid inquiry has this afternoon published a full report on its first module, assessing the resilience and preparedness of the UK’s pandemic response. It has so far been met with apparently predetermined headlines of how the UK Government failed its citizens by “preparing for the wrong pandemic”, and that the country was “ill-prepared”. The impact of austerity meant that this was certainly true — but the currently unreported and biggest story in the report is its wholesale attack on the lockdown approach itself.

Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on June 18 backed COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months of age.

The advisers unanimously voted to advise the CDC to recommend all children, save for those who have contraindications to the vaccines, from 6 months through 5 years of age get the Moderna or Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines, both of which are built on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky will now decide whether or not to accept the advice.

A key CDC advisory committee unanimously voted to support a recommendation that Moderna and Pfizer COVID shots be allowed for children as young as six months old.

Why it matters: If CDC Director Rochelle Walensky agrees, the shots could be in little arms as early as next week.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee on Saturday endorsed Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines for young children, the last step before Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky can issue her final signoff.

The unanimous recommendations from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices followed the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the shots on Friday.

A federal appeals court gave the green light for President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large private employers to be implemented as it reversed a previous decision that had put it on hold. The final say over the mandate, which affects some 84 million workers across the United States, will likely rest in the hands of the Supreme Court as opponents immediately filed appeals.

A federal appeals court on Friday reinstated the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for businesses with at least 100 workers.

Why it matters: The administration paused enforcement of the mandate, which requires companies to ensure their workers are fully vaccinated or tested weekly by Jan. 4, 2022, after a separate federal circuit court last month deemed it "staggeringly overbroad."

The U.S. Appeals Court for the Sixth Circuit ruled late on Friday that Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration can resume enforcing a vaccine mandate on companies with 100 or more employees.

The Biden administration’s vaccine mandate was reinstated after the court ruled 2-1 to allow the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to resume enforcement.

Remember the promise of normalcy by July Fourth? How can it be that now — after Thanksgiving, after so much sacrifice and waiting, after the arrival of vaccines, after months of sweaty masks, distancing and isolation — that another wave of pandemic infection is upon us? In Europe, lockdowns are returning. In some hot spots such as Minnesota and Michigan, hospital wards are again overflowing. A worrying new variant is raising alarms. What happened?

Markets sold off worldwide on Friday after South Africa raised alarm about the new “variant of concern” that the World Health Organization named Omicron. The panic may be driven more by the fear of new government lockdowns and social distancing than by the variant itself.

The emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, with a suite of mutations that suggests it might be extra transmissible and be able to evade at least some immune protection, has the world eager for answers about what it means for the Covid-19 pandemic. But so much remains unknown largely because the variant appears to have been detected and publicized so quickly.