The family initially kept in touch with their mother, asking when she would come home after being healed. She kept making promises to return, but never did. Achieng tried to convince her mother to leave the place, she said, but her attempts were in vain.
Kennedy said child vaccine boosters lacked clinical dataKennedy said, “Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children.”
In recent years, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices – a group of outside experts that advises the CDC on who should be vaccinated and how often – has recommended annual boosters for healthy children who have already received COVID-19 vaccines.The committee made this recommendation without also recommending that every annual iteration of the vaccine undergo new rounds of clinical trials before being used, said Dr William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. (The vaccine had been approved by the FDA for safety and efficacy early in the pandemic.) The panel concluded that the coronavirus vaccine operated in the same way as the annual flu vaccine, which has not required repeated clinical trials, said Schaffner, a former committee member and current adviser.The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians also recommended COVID-19 vaccinations for children and did not urge new clinical trials.
Kids generally don’t need the vaccination, FDA chief saidMakary said, “There’s no evidence healthy kids need” the vaccine.
This is disputed. Most children will not face serious illness from COVID-19, but a small fraction will. Experts draw different lines when deciding how widespread the vaccination programme needs to be, given this scale of risk.
During the 2024-25 COVID-19 season, children and adolescents age 17 and younger comprised about 4 percent of COVID-19-associated hospitalisations. The relatively small number of serious cases among children has driven the belief among some scientists that the universal vaccination recommendation is too broad.Avelo Airlines, a struggling, Houston, Texas-based budget carrier, has faced weeks of backlash after taking a contract with the United States government to use its planes to deport migrants, the first commercial airline to do so.
Avelo, which started the deportation flights in mid-May, defended the move in an April 3 letter to employees, saying its partnership with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is “too valuable not to pursue”.Founded in 2021, the airline has been in financial turmoil and was projected to have only about $2m in cash on hand by June, the trade publication Airline Observer reported last month. An Avelo spokesperson told Al Jazeera that that reporting is outdated.
The airline has not disclosed the terms of the deal with ICE but is said to be using three of its Boeing 737 aircraft for the flights. Avelo has 20 aircraft in its fleet.At the beginning of 2024, Avelo reported its first profitable quarter since its founding but hasn’t released any financial results since then. Because it is not a publicly traded company, Avelo is not legally obligated to regularly disclose its financial status to the public.