CDC OKs Moderna’s shot for kids, teens aged 6 through 17
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday recommended Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine be used as an option for children and adolescents aged 6 through 17 years.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, signed off on the panel’s recommendation less than a week after she endorsed Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccines for even younger children.
Scientific advisers to the CDC concluded Thursday that the benefits of the Moderna vaccine outweigh potential risks, and recommended two doses of the vaccine for children and teens.
The recommendation was one of the last hurdles before a second vaccine option becomes available to a large swath of those younger than 18. The vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech has been available to children 5 through 15 since last year and to Americans 16 and older since late 2020.
Last June, Moderna applied to use its vaccine in adolescents aged 12 to 17 years. But the FDA stalled Moderna’s application. In October, Moderna said the FDA was reviewing reports that suggested its vaccine can cause heart problems in adolescent boys. The company also said it would hold off on applying for authorization for children 6 through 11 until the FDA had made a decision for the older children.
CDC researchers determined the Moderna vaccine is safe overall. It carries a very small risk of transient heart problems in boys aged 12 to 17, but a similar risk has been observed with the Pfizer vaccine, according to Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC scientist who presented the data.
Several studies have shown that COVID-19 itself carries a much higher risk of heart problems than either vaccine.
Still, to minimize the risk of heart problems, the CDC now recommends that boys and men between the ages of 12 and 39 space their doses apart by eight weeks.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson suffered a double blow as voters rejected his Conservative Party in two special parliamentary elections dominated by questions about his leadership and ethics.
He absorbed another setback when the party’s chairman quit after the results came out early Friday, saying Conservatives “cannot carry on with business as usual,” and a former party leader said the country needed “new leadership.”
The centrist Liberal Democrats overturned a big Conservative majority to win the rural southwest England seat of Tiverton and Honiton, while the main opposition Labor Party reclaimed Wakefield in northern England from Johnson’s Tories.
The contests, triggered by the resignations of Conservative lawmakers hit by sex scandals, offered voters the chance to give their verdict on the prime minister just weeks after 41% of his own MPs voted to oust him.
Blow to UK’s Johnson: Guantanamo inmate freed:
An Afghan prisoner held in U.S. custody for nearly 15 years has been released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center after a federal court ruled that he was unlawfully detained, the U.S. Department of Defense said Friday.
Asadullah Haroon Gul’s release was first announced earlier in the day by the Taliban in Afghanistan and an
international human rights group.
The United States opened the detention center under President George W. Bush in January 2002 and it later became notorious after reports emerged of detainees being humiliated and tortured.
Gul was greeted upon landing in Doha, Qatar, by top Taliban official Suhail Shaheen, who said Gul would soon fly home to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Department of Defense said Gul’s release was in accord with a district court in Washington’s decision that the United States “no longer has a legal basis to justify the continued detention” of Gul. The statement also thanked Qatar for its assistance without providing any details. Afghanistan quake: Tents, food and medical supplies rolled into the mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan where thousands were left homeless or injured by this week’s powerful earthquake,
which state media said killed 1,150 people.
A new aftershock Friday took five more lives and deepened the misery.
Among the dead from Wednesday’s magnitude 6 quake are 121 children, but that figure is expected to climb, said Mohamed Ayoya, UNICEF’s representative in Afghanistan. He said almost 70 children were injured.
The quake struck a remote, deeply impoverished region of small towns and villages tucked among rough mountains near the Pakistani border, collapsing stone and mud-brick homes and in some cases killing entire families. Nearly 3,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged in Paktika and Khost provinces, state media reported.
The effort to help the victims has been slowed by geography and by Afghanistan’s decimated condition.
Pelosi’s husband charged: Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was
charged Thursday with driving under the influence in connection with a crash he was in last month.
Paul Pelosi, 82, was arrested following the May 28 crash in Napa County, north of San Francisco, after a DUI test showed he had a blood alcohol content level of .082%. The blood sample was taken about two hours after the collision occurred at 10:17 p.m., the Napa County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
He was driving a 2021 Porsche into an intersection near the town of Yountville and was hit by a 2014 Jeep, according to the California Highway Patrol.
Bow-and-arrow attack: A man was found guilty Friday of murder and attempted murder for fatally stabbing five people and wounding four others in southern Norway when he attacked strangers with a bow and arrows and knives.
The Buskerud District Court sentenced Espen Andersen Brathen, 38, to
compulsory mental health care. Three forensic psychiatric experts who assessed him concluded he has chronic paranoid schizophrenia and was mentally ill at the time of the attack last Oct. 13.
Both the prosecution and the defense had called for compulsory mental health care for him.
Brathen was also found guilty of 11 counts of attempted murder for shooting at people with a bow and arrows in Kongsberg, a former mining town of 26,000 people. He was carrying 62 arrows and four knives at the time of the attack.
The three-judge court said the defendant had explained during the trial “that he had decided to kill people in order to achieve rebirth. He said he thought he was going to go blind.”
Brathen’s defense lawyer, Fredrik Neumann, said, according to Norwegian broadcaster NRK, that his client “had delusions with religious and magical content.”