Month: January 2022

Enlarge / A vial of the current Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Ivan Romano)

The first doses of omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccines went into the arms of clinical trial participants this week. This took place just as the towering wave of cases from the ultratransmissible coronavirus variant appears to be cresting in the US, and experts are unsure of what to expect next.

Leading mRNA-based vaccine makers Moderna and partners Pfizer and BioNTech each announced this week that they had dosed their first trial participants. The tweaked vaccine doses update existing formulations to match the mutations found in omicron’s spike protein rather than the spike protein present in an earlier version of SARS-CoV-2.

The companies all emphasized that three doses of existing vaccines—two doses in the primary series, followed by a booster dose—are holding up against omicron. The doses provide strong protection from severe disease, hospitalization, and death, say the companies. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published data suggesting that three doses are 82 percent effective at preventing visits to urgent care clinics and emergency departments for COVID-19. Three doses, the CDC added, are also 90 percent effective at preventing hospitalization.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

If you’re using either Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive to sync files on a Mac, you’ll want to pay attention to the release notes for today’s macOS 12.3 beta: the update is deprecating a kernel extension used by both apps to download files on demand. The extension means that files are available when you need them but don’t take up space on your disk when you don’t. Apple says that “both service providers have replacements for this functionality currently in beta.”

Both Microsoft and Dropbox started alerting users to this change before the macOS beta even dropped. Dropbox’s page is relatively sparse. The page notifies users that Dropbox’s online-only file functionality will break in macOS 12.3 and that a beta version of the Dropbox client with a fix will be released in March.

Microsoft’s documentation for OneDrive’s Files On-Demand feature is more detailed. It explains that Microsoft will be using Apple’s File Provider extensions for future OneDrive versions, that the new Files On-Demand feature will be on by default, and that Files On-Demand will be supported in macOS 12.1 and later.