Here in the United States, the death toll from COVID-19 has topped 950,000, by far the highest reported death toll of any nation. The virus continues to kill 2,000 U.S. residents, on average, each day.

Meanwhile, new research finds a third dose of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine dramatically increases protection against mild illness from the Omicron coronavirus variant. The study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that protection against symptomatic disease plummeted to just 8% in people who had two shots of Pfizer’s vaccine. A third dose provided a rapid and substantial increase in protection against both mild and severe illness from Omicron. Similar results were observed for Moderna’s vaccine.