Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Fisher-Price rockers pose infant death risk, maker, officials warn
WASHINGTON — Fisher-Price and U.S. product safety regulators are telling parents not to let their infants fall asleep in the company’s rockers after 13 infants died in the devices between 2009 and 2021.
The deaths happened when the babies fell asleep in Fisher Price’s Infant-to-Toddler and Newborn-to-Toddler rockers. The company, along with U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, said the rockers should never be used for sleep and infants should never be left unsupervised or unrestrained in them.
Fisher-Price, a division of El Segundo, California-based Mattel Inc., recalled a similar product last year after four infants died after they were placed on their backs unrestrained in the 4-in-1 Rock ’n Glide Soother. Those fatalities, all children under 4 months old, occurred between April 2019 and February 2020.
In 2019, the CPSC recalled another similar Fisher-Price product, the Rock ’n Play Sleeper, after 30 infant fatalities were reported. Doctors, parents and consumer advocates had warned the company for years that the product was unsafe and should be recalled.
CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka said a gag order implemented by Congress in 1981 prevented the agency from issuing an immediate warning to consumers without first seeking permission from the product’s maker. In the most recent case, Trumka said the gag order delayed the warning message by two months.
“Congress must immediately repeal the gag rule,” Trumka said in a release separate from Tuesday’s product warning. “If CPSC cannot issue timely warnings, dangers will remain hidden in people’s homes.”
A new rule finalized by the CPSC requires that infant sleep products have a sleep surface angle of 10 degrees or less. The rule goes into effect June 23.
Consumers are encouraged to report incidents involving these or other infant products to the CPSC at saferproducts.gov.
Moderna vaccine for kids: A government advisory panel Tuesday endorsed a second brand of COVID-19 vaccine for school-age children and teens.
The Food and Drug Administration’s outside experts voted unanimously that Moderna’s vaccine is safe and effective enough to give kids ages 6 to 17. If the FDA agrees, it would become the second option for those children, joining Pfizer’s vaccine.
The same FDA expert panel will meet Wednesday to consider tot-sized shots from Moderna and Pfizer for the youngest kids, those under 5.
If the FDA authorizes Moderna’s vaccine for teens and younger children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will next decide whether to recommend the shots.
China mayor apologizes: The mayor of a northeastern Chinese city on the North Korean border that has been under lockdown for more than 50 days has apologized for failures in his administration’s work amid widespread — but often disguised — dissatisfaction over the government’s heavy-handed approach to handling the pandemic.
Dandong Mayor Hao Jianjun gave no specifics, but said government work and basic services had been “unsatisfactory,” for which he offered his apologies, according to a statement issued by the city government late Monday.
It is highly unusual for a ranking Communist Party official to publicly concede errors, particularly regarding the hardline “zero-COVID” policy that has been repeatedly endorsed by top officials under President and party leader Xi Jinping.
Despite reporting only a handful of cases, Dandong has seen one of the strictest lockdowns in China.
Unable to root out the source of new cases, Dandong officials took increasingly extreme measures that included recommending the city’s 2.4 million residents close their windows to prevent the virus being blown in from North Korea.
Britain migrant plan: Britain has canceled its first deportation flight to Rwanda after a last-minute intervention by the European Court of Human Rights, which decided there was “a real risk of irreversible harm’’ to the asylum seekers involved.
The flight had been scheduled to leave Tuesday evening but lawyers for the asylum seekers launched a flurry of case-by-case appeals seeking to block the deportation of everyone on the government’s list.
The decision to scrap Tuesday’s flight caps three days of frantic court challenges as immigration rights advocates and labor unions sought to stop the deportations. The leaders of the Church of England joined the opposition, calling the government’s policy “immoral.”
Earlier in the day, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had emphatically defended the plan, arguing that the move is a legitimate way to protect lives and thwart the gangs that smuggle migrants across the English Channel in small boats.
Johnson announced an agreement in April in which people who entered Britain illegally would be deported to Rwanda. In exchange for accepting them, Rwanda would receive millions of dollars in development aid.
The deportees would be allowed to apply for asylum in Rwanda, not Britain.
Opponents have argued that it is illegal and inhumane to send people thousands of miles to a country they don’t want to live in.
Putin critic transferred: Allies of imprisoned opposition politician Alexei Navalny sounded the alarm Tuesday when they discovered he was no longer in the prison where he had been serving his time.
But late in the day, the chairman of a prison monitoring commission said Navalny had been transferred to a maximum-security prison nearby.
Prison transfers in Russia sometimes take days and are shrouded in secrecy. Navalny, the most determined political foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in January 2021 upon returning from Germany, where he had been recuperating from nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin, and handed a 2½-year sentence for a parole violation. In March, Navalny was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of fraud and contempt of court.
Cambodia treason trials: A Cambodian American lawyer and dozens of members of a now-dissolved opposition party were convicted of treason Tuesday in a trial that is part of efforts to tame opposition to the long-running rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Lawyer Theary Seng and most of the other defendants were charged over a failed attempt by Sam Rainsy, the leader of the defunct Cambodia National Rescue Party, to return from exile in 2019. Cambodian authorities alleged that the 60 defendants were involved in organizing his trip, which Theary Seng and the others have denied.
Cambodian courts are widely believed to be under the influence of Hun Sen, whose authoritarian rule has kept him in power for 37 years.