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Health

Complications during pregnancy linked to a higher risk of heart disease, study finds

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CNN
 — 

Five major pregnancy complications are strong lifelong risk factors for ischemic heart disease, a new study finds, with the greatest risk coming in the decade after delivery.

Ischemic heart disease refers to heart problems, including heart attack, caused by narrowed or dysfunctional blood vessels that reduce blood and oxygen flow to the heart.

Gestational diabetes and preeclampsia increased the risk of ischemic heart disease in the study by 54% and 30%, respectively, while other high blood pressure disorders during pregnancy doubled the risk. Delivering a baby early – before 37 weeks – or delivering a baby with a low birth weight were associated with a 72% and 10% increased risk, respectively.

The study, published in Wednesday in the BMJ, followed a cohort of more than 2 million women in Sweden with no history of heart disease who gave birth to single live infants between 1973 and 2015.

Roughly 30% of the women had at least one adverse pregnancy outcome. Those who had multiple adverse outcomes – whether in the same or different pregnancies – showed further increased risk of ischemic heart disease.

“These pregnancy outcomes are early signals for future risk of heart disease and can help identify high-risk women earlier and enable earlier interventions to improve their long-term outcomes and help prevent the development of heart disease in these women,” said Dr. Casey Crump, an author of the study and professor of family medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among women in the United States and accounts for 1 in 5 female deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This research adds to mounting evidence that pregnancy provides important information about a woman’s cardiovascular health.

“What happens to a woman during pregnancy is almost like a stress test or a marker for her future cardiovascular risk after pregnancy. And unfortunately, a lot of women don’t get told this by anybody,” said CNN Medical Correspondent Dr. Tara Narula, an associate professor of cardiology and the associate director of the Women’s Heart Program at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was not involved in the new study.

Although it’s not completely clear why, experts say the normal changes that occur during pregnancy may unmask underlying health issues in some women with certain risk factors.

Experiencing an adverse pregnancy outcome – even temporarily – could result in changes to blood vessels and the heart that may persist or progress after delivery, increasing a woman’s risk for cardiovascular disease.

This heightened risk is a particular concern for women in the US, experts say, where the maternal mortality rate is several times higher than in other high-income countries.

“There’s been a change in the birthing population. US women are getting pregnant at a later age, and they have already accrued maybe one or two cardiovascular risk factors. Perhaps there are other stressors in life – depression, stress, isolation, obesity – lots of different things that are impacting women in the US,” said Dr. Garima Sharma, associate professor of cardiology and director of the Cardio-Obstetrics Program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who also was not involved in the new study.

Pregnancy complications are carefully monitored during pregnancy, but there is little evaluation of and education about the effects on cardiovascular health after delivery for women, experts say.

“And so they have their delivery, they’ve had maybe preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, and nobody really follows up with them. They are not told that, in fact, they are at increased risk,” Narula said.

Gestational diabetes is a marker not only for increased risk of diabetes but also for general cardiovascular disease. Preeclampsia and eclampsia are markers for hypertension risk as well as general cardiovascular risks.

Narula, a cardiologist who specializes in caring for women, regularly considers adverse pregnancy outcomes when evaluating patients and emphasizes the continued need for this.

“The classic risk calculator that we use doesn’t have anything in there for pregnancy complications, but you know, it should for women, and hopefully someday, they will start to take that into account,” she said.

The American Heart Association recommends that all health care professionals take a detailed history of pregnancy complications when assessing a woman’s heart disease risk, but this is not consistently done in clinical practice, especially in primary care, where most women are seen, Crump says.

“Raising awareness of these findings among physicians as well as women hopefully will enable more of these women to be screened early and hopefully improve their long-term outcomes,” he said.

Roughly 1 in 3 women will have an adverse pregnancy outcome. Experts say that improving your health before getting pregnant can help avoid these issues.

“Reducing your risk should start preconception, and so getting your body and yourself into the healthiest state possible before you ever even get pregnant is really the first step,” Narula said.

This includes achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight with a good diet and regular exercise, controlling high blood pressure and diabetes, quitting smoking and managing stress.

Taking action after pregnancy is equally important, as research has estimated that only 30% to 80% of women have a postpartum checkup 6 to 8 weeks after delivery.

“Making sure that these women actually are appropriately followed after their delivery and that there is a warm handoff between [obstetrics] and [maternal-fetal medicine] to their primary care doctors or preventive cardiologists who can then talk about optimizing cardiovascular risks and reduction of these risk factors post-pregnancy in the postpartum time frame is crucial,” Sharma said.

Experts hope that increased patient and provider awareness of the connection between pregnancy and heart health will keep birth from being a cause of death.

“Cardiovascular disease is preventable. It’s a leading cause of maternal mortality, but it doesn’t have to be. If we do a better job at screening patients before they get pregnant, if we do a better job of treating them during pregnancy and postpartum, we can improve women’s outcomes,” Narula said. “It’s a tragedy to bring a new life into the world, and then the mother suffers some horrible complication and/or death that could have been prevented.”

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World

Myanmar coup anniversary: A world looks away from country’s descent into horror

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CNN
 — 

Content warning: This story contains descriptions of violence against children and images viewers may find disturbing.

Bhone Tayza had been impatient to start school. A broken arm had kept the 7-year-old home while the other kids began their lessons, but now that his cast was off, he couldn’t wait to join in.

His mother, Thida Win, was still worried. “Just stay home for today,” she recalls telling her son on his third day back at school last September – but he went anyway.

Hours later, the airstrike hit.

Thida Win was home, in the central Sagaing region of Myanmar, when army helicopters began firing “heavy weapons” including machine guns near her house, she said. She took cover until the shooting stopped, then sprinted to the nearby school, frantic. She finally found Bhone in a classroom, barely alive in a pool of blood, next to the bodies of other children.

“He asked me twice, ‘Mom, please just kill me,’” she said. “He was in so much pain.” Surrounded by armed soldiers of Myanmar’s military who had swarmed the school grounds, she pulled Bhone into her lap, praying and doing her best to comfort him until he died.

He was one of at least 13 victims, including seven children, in the September attack – and among the thousands killed nationwide since the military seized power in a coup on February 1, 2021.

The junta ousted democratically elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was later sentenced to 33 years in jail during secretive trials; cracked down on anti-coup protests; arrested journalists and political prisoners; and executed several leading pro-democracy activists, drawing condemnation from the United Nations and rights groups.

Two years on, the Southeast Asian country is being rocked by violence and instability. The economy has collapsed, with shortages of food, fuel and other basic supplies.

Deep in the jungle, rebel groups have taken the fight to the military. Among their number are many teenagers and fresh graduates, whose lives and ambitions have been upended by a war with no end in sight.

For months after the coup, millions across Myanmar took part in protests, strikes and other forms of civil disobedience, unwilling to relinquish freedoms won only recently under democratic reforms that followed decades of brutal military rule.

They were met with a bloody crackdown that saw civilians shot in the street, abducted in nighttime raids and allegedly tortured in detention.

CNN has reached out to Myanmar’s military for comment. It has previously claimed in state media it is using the “least force” and is complying with “existing law and international norms.”

Since the coup, at least 2,900 people in Myanmar have been killed by junta troops and over 17,500 arrested, the majority of whom are still in detention, according to advocacy group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP).

Though mass protests have faded, allegations of atrocities by military troops – including the school strike in the village of Let Yet Kone – continue to emerge.

Daw Aye Mar Swe, a teacher at the school, said she ushered students into classrooms as the military helicopters approached, shortly before the horror descended.

The airstrike hit the roof, sending debris falling all around them. The room filled with dark smoke – and then the soldiers arrived.

They began “shooting at the school for an hour nonstop … with the intention to kill us all,” she told CNN.

She shoved her students under beds for cover, but it was of little use. One young girl was shot in the back. As she tried in vain to stem the bleeding, she urged her crying students: “Say a prayer, as only God can save us now.”

When the shooting was over, the soldiers ordered everybody outside, she said. The students huddled together on the school grounds while the soldiers raided the rest of the village and made arrests, said Daw Aye Mar Swe. She recalled seeing Bhone Tayza among the wounded.

The National Unity Government (NUG), Myanmar’s shadow administration of ousted lawmakers, said 20 students and teachers were arrested after the airstrikes.

It’s not clear what happened to them. CNN could not independently verify details of the incident.

At the time, a spokesperson for the military said government forces entered the village of Let Yet Kone to clear rebel “terrorists” and accused the Kachin Independence Army, a rebel group, and the People’s Defence Force (PDF), an umbrella organization of armed guerrillas, of using children as “human shields.”

Thida Win and Daw Aye Mar Swe denied these claims. “There is no PDF here, or shooting (done by the PDF),” the teacher said. “(The military) shoot us without any purpose or research.”

For some bereaved parents, the agony of losing their children was compounded by being denied a proper goodbye.

After the strike, two residents, who declined to be identified due to fears for their security, said the military took the bodies away and buried them in another township several miles away.

Thida Win corroborated this account, saying she had cried and begged the soldiers to “let me bury my son on my own … but they took him away.” When she contacted a military commander the next day, he said Bhone had already been cremated. To this day, she has not collected his ashes, saying she would not sign any documents issued by the junta that killed her son.

“There are no words … my heart is broken into pieces,” she said.

In between these large-scale attacks, smaller battles are unfolding every day between the military and rebel groups that have sprouted up across the country, allying themselves with long-established ethnic militias.

Some of these groups effectively control parts of Myanmar out of the junta’s reach – and many are composed of young volunteers who left behind families and friends, for what they say is the future of their nation.

Shan Lay, 20, was a high school senior when the coup took place. Now, he spends his days on the front lines as a member of the MoeBye PDF Rescue Team, a small group of combat medics that treats and evacuates injured PDF fighters in eastern Myanmar.

It can be a dangerous job; Shan Lay recalled one instance when their vehicle was shot at and destroyed by military soldiers, forcing the team to jump from the car and run to safety.

Another member of the rescue team, Rosalin, a former nurse, described once hiding in what was supposed to be a secret clinic. The building had been surrounded by junta soldiers and aircraft were circling overhead, so the team waited for nightfall so they could escape in the dark. “I thought I was going to die, and I was ready to relinquish my life,” she said.

CNN is referring to Shan Lay and Rosalin by their “revolution names,” aliases many in the resistance movement adopt for their safety.

Videos of their daily operations, shared by the rescue team, reveal improvised tools and treacherous conditions. Often, they wear no helmets or protective gear, ducking gunfire in just flip flops, t-shirts, long pants and backpacks.

The clips show the group carrying injured fighters on rocky dirt paths, and providing medical care during bumpy rides on pickup trucks; sometimes they have nothing more than boiled water to sterilize wounds, Rosalin said.

When the fighting lulls, they treat injured civilians displaced from their homes and distribute food.

Their jobs are made more difficult by the remote terrain, choppy telecommunications, and unpredictable dangers. When they spoke to CNN over Zoom in January, they had hiked to a higher altitude for better phone service, and were running late after responding to a PDF fighter who had lost his foot after stepping on a land mine.

Rosalin said the junta left them no choice but to fight back after crushing their peaceful protests.

“We know we may have to give up our lives. But if we don’t fight like this, then we know we won’t get democracy, which is what we want,” she said. “As long as this dictatorship is present and we do not have democracy, this revolution will continue.”

Even those not on the front lines have found other ways to resist; there are underground hospitals and schools operating out of the junta’s view, and people have boycotted goods or services related to the junta.

“It’s a remarkable, remarkable show of courage and determination by people,” said Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.

However, despite the rebels’ best efforts, it’s a desperately uneven fight. And after two years of conflict, their funds and resources are dwindling.

“Before, we had our own homes and pots, we had our own rice, we had some of our money,” said Rosalin. “But we had to leave behind our homes and go live in the jungle.” Finding food and accommodation is challenging, she added.

Shan Lay said some people had sold their houses and land to buy weapons and bullets – but it’s still not enough, and a difficult road lies ahead.

The fighting “is more violent” now, he said. “(The junta) are using larger weapons than before.”

Resources are slim in other rebel bases too, with footage from Myanmar’s eastern Karenni state showing uniformed youth training in the mountains, making homemade ammunition in jungle workshops and storing the rounds in refrigerators.

The pictures are a far cry from the military’s powerful arsenal of tanks and warplanes.

The junta demonstrated its devastating firepower just weeks after the school attack with one of its deadliest airstrikes on record.

Crowds had gathered in the A Nang Pa region of Myanmar’s northern Kachin state to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the political wing of the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

Though the event was organized by the KIO, it was aimed at the public, with artists, singers, religious figures and industry leaders invited, according to a businessman who attended. He described a day of festivities, with people bathing in a stream, playing golf and eating noodles under teak trees before watching a musical performance by a famous singer.

When the airstrike happened, “It was like the end of the world,” the businessman said. Footage of the moment of impact, shared with CNN by the KIO, show people sitting around tables facing the stage when there came a dazzling light and loud crash – followed by flashes of orange light, then darkness.

“I heard people crying, speaking and moaning,” said the businessman. “I was standing in a horrific scene.” Bodies appeared to be everywhere; he saw people trapped under debris and some who had lost limbs.

Videos of the aftermath show buildings reduced to rubble and body bags lined up on the ground.

CNN is not naming the businessman for his safety.

The strike killed up to 70 people, according to the KIO. CNN cannot independently verify the number.

When CNN requested comment from the junta regarding the attack, CNN’s email – and an official response – were published in the government-owned Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper. Military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it a necessary military operation targeting “a den where enemies and terrorists were hiding.” He also claimed the military had “never attacked civilians,” calling such reports “fake news.”

KIO leaders deny this. They say the venue was a day’s walk from the nearest KIA battalion, and though some KIO members were in uniform at the event, they were not carrying weapons or military equipment.

Andrews, the UN special rapporteur, also cast doubt on the junta’s claim of not striking civilians. “That statement is absurd,” he told CNN in January. “There is clear evidence we have of airstrikes on villages.”

As millions of civilians in Myanmar grapple with their grim post-coup reality, much of the world looks the other way.

“It has been two years of the devastation of the military junta and the military at war with its own people,” Andrews said. “We’ve seen 1.1 million people displaced, more than 28,000 homes destroyed, thousands of people have been killed.”

The economy is in freefall, with Myanmar’s GDP contracting 18% in 2021. While the World Bank forecasts a slight uptick to 3% growth in 2022, some experts say this is “wildly over-optimistic.”

About 40% of the population were living under the poverty line last year, “unwinding nearly a decade of progress on poverty reduction,” the World Bank said last July. Prices for basic goods like food and fuel have skyrocketed.

But little support has come from the outside. The European Parliament passed a motion in 2021 supporting the NUG as “the only legitimate representatives of the democratic wishes of the people of Myanmar,” and it remains one of the few places that has done so. But no military aid has followed.

Though the European Union and other governments have provided funding for humanitarian aid, relief remains limited. Groups such as the Red Cross say their operations on the ground have been hindered by fighting and financial challenges. In a December report, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said its response plan for Myanmar was “drastically underfunded,” amounting to $290 million out of the $826 million required.

The conflict “has been forgotten,” Andrews said, contrasting the international community’s muted response to Myanmar versus the rush to provide weapons, funding and other assistance to Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The Ukraine model could be applied to Myanmar, he added – not in terms of importing weapons, but in taking “coordinated actions such as economic sanctions that target the junta’s source of revenue, that target their weapons, that target the raw materials that they’re using to build weapons inside the country.”

Andrews pointed to signs that the junta is struggling too, which makes international aid all the more critical for turning the tide. There are reports the military controls less than half of the country and that its operations are suffering from financial difficulties, thanks in part to sanctions already in place, he said. But more is still needed.

“If (the conflict) remains in the shadows of international attention, then we are providing a death sentence to untold numbers of people,” Andrews warned.

Thida Win, the mother of Bhone Tayza, had a similar plea. She is still grieving the loss of a son she described as studious, intelligent and kind, for whom she “had so much hope.”

“I want to ask the world to support us so our children’s death will not be in vain,” she said. “Will you just look away from us? How many kids have to risk their lives?”

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Health

Adult drug use rose during pandemic, but dropped dramatically in youth, study says

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CNN
 — 

Use of marijuana and other substances dropped in teenagers during the first year of the pandemic, according to a new study.

But adults’ use of cannabis, illegal drugs and alcohol, including binge drinking, either stayed the same or increased compared to the two years before Covid-19.

“Substance use decreased between 2019 and 2020 among those aged 13 to 20 years,” wrote first author Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

However, “consistent declines were not seen in older persons other than tobacco use reductions, and cannabis use increased among adults ages 25 years and older,” he and his coauthors wrote.

The study analyzed data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study, which follows tobacco and other substance use over time among 49,000 US youths and adults.

“A particular strength of this study was the longitudinal design,” said Joseph Palamar, an associate professor of population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

“This design allows us to look at changes among the same people over time as opposed to other national studies which compare different groups of people across time,” he said.

Substance abuse dropped in teenagers between ages 13 and 17, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Cannabis use among teenagers ages 13 and 15 dropped by 3.4 percentage points in 2020 compared to 2018 and 2019, while tobacco use declined by about 4 points, the study found. The use of other illegal or misused prescription drugs also fell 2.5 percentage points in this age group.

Use of marijuana in teens ages 16 and 17 dropped 7.3 percentage points in 2020 compared to 2018 and 2019. Tobacco use fell by over 10 points and misuse of drugs sank by nearly 3 percentage points. Binge drinking dipped by 1.6 percentage points across the age group.

“I think availability plays a big part,” Palamar said. “If high schoolers are separated from their friends for a long time and stuck inside, they’ll likely have decreased access to drugs.

“Even if a teen successfully obtained weed, this doesn’t mean he or she had somewhere away from parents to smoke it if the whole family was on lockdown,” he added.

The use of alcohol increased by over five percentage points (from 60.2% to 65.2%) among adults ages 21 to 24 years old in 2020 compared to the previous two years. Binge drinking, however, fell by 2.2 points.

Tobacco use fell by about 8 percentage points, but use of marijuana and other illegal or prescription drugs did not change significantly in this age group, according to the study.

Use of marijuana increased slightly in adults 25 and up, by 1.2 percentage points. Declines in other substance abuse in this age group were not significant, the study authors said.

Tobacco use fell for all adults, the study found. The number of young adults ages 18 to 20 smoking tobacco dropped by just over 15 percentage points in 2020 compared to 2018 and 2019. Smoking also declined by about 8 points in adults ages 21 and up over the same period.

However, a drop in drug use during the early days of Covid did not mean the reduction continued as the pandemic wore on, said Palamar, who has been studying drug availability during that period.

“Decreases in use during the early months of Covid are meaningful, but we need to keep in mind that use of some drugs rebounded,” Palamar said. “For example, we found that seizures of marijuana and methamphetamine decreased after the start of Covid, and then rebounded to a much higher rate later in the year.”

A separate survey of people ages 19 to 30 found they were using marijuana and hallucinogens at high rates in 2021. The Monitoring the Future Study, published in 2022, found 11% of people in this age group used marijuana on a daily basis in 2021, while 43% said they had used it in the past year.

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Health

Infant screen time could impact academic success, study says

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CNN
 — 

Letting infants watch tablets and TV may be impairing their academic achievement and emotional well-being later on, according to a new study.

Researchers found that increased use of screen time during infancy was associated with poorer executive functioning once the child was 9 years old, according to the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

Executive functioning skills are mental processes that “enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully,” according to the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child.

Those executive functioning skills are important for higher-level cognition, such as emotional regulation, learning, academic achievement and mental health, according to the study. They influence our success socially, academically, professionally and in how we care for ourselves, said Dr. Erika Chiappini, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

“Though these cognitive processes naturally develop from infancy through adulthood, they are also impacted by the experiences that we have and when we have them in our development,” said Chiappini, who was not involved in the study, in an email.

The results support recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which discourages all screen time before 18 months old, with the exception of video chatting, said Dr. Joyce Harrison, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Harrison was not involved in the research.

The study looked at data from Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes, or GUSTO, which surveyed women from all socioeconomic backgrounds during their first trimester of pregnancy. The sample was made up of 437 children who underwent electroencephalography (EEG) scans, which are used to look at the neural pathways of cognitive functions in the brain, at age 1, 18 months and 9 years old.

The parents reported each child’s screen time, and researchers found there was an association between screen time in infancy and attention and executive function at 9 years old, according to the study.

Further research needs to be done, however, to determine if the screen time caused the impairments in executive function or if there are other factors in the child’s environment that predispose them to both more screen time and poorer executive functioning, the study noted.

In a learning-packed time like infancy, one of the big problems with screen use is that young children aren’t learning much from them, according to AAP.

“There is no substitute for adult interaction, modeling and teaching,” Harrison said.

Babies have a hard time interpreting information presented in two dimensions, such as on screens, and have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, Chiappini said.

“Babies and kids are also social learners and very much benefit from the back-and-forth interaction with others (adults and kids) which is hard to achieve with screens,” Chiappini said via email.

When it comes to emotional regulation, infants and toddlers can learn from their caregivers when they model self-control or help to label emotions and appropriate expressions, she added.

For example, you can give a young child options for what they can do when they are mad, like taking a break or breathing deeply instead of inappropriate behaviors like hitting, Harrison said.

Talking about emotions can be too abstract for preschool-age kids, and in those cases using color zones to talk about emotions can be helpful, said Dr. Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. Radesky was not involved in the research.

Calm and content can be green; worried or agitated can be yellow; and upset or angry can be red, using graphics or images of faces to help kids match what they’re feeling with their color zone. To reinforce it, adults can talk about their own emotions in terms of colors in front of their kids, Radesky said in a CNN previous article.

Parents and children can go through the colors together and come up with calming tools for the different zones, she added.

To strengthen those executive function skills, Harrison says it’s important to provide structured engagement where a child can work through solving problems to the extent that they can at their developmental level — instead of having problems solved for them.

And yet, sometimes parents just need to get the laundry done or attend a work meeting, and screens can feel like an effective distraction.

For very young children, it’s probably still best to avoid screen time, Harrison emphasized.

Instead, try to involve the child in house chores, she said.

“Give your toddler some clothes to fold alongside you while you are trying to get laundry done or keep your infant safely in a position where you can make frequent eye contact while you are engaged your chore,” Harrison said via email.

For older preschoolers, save up your screen time to use strategically, she said.

“For example, their one hour of screen time can be reserved for a time when you have an important video meeting to attend,” Harrison said.

And there is some content that can help teach emotional regulation when your tank is empty. Finding media that is aimed at speaking to children directly about emotions — like Daniel Tiger or Elmo Belly Breathing — can be like a meditation instead of distraction, Radesky previously told CNN.

And you can make screen time works better by engaging your child while they watch, Chiappini said. Ask questions like “what is that character feeling?” and “what could they do to help their friend?” she added.

Raising children is a complex and sometimes overwhelming task, and no caregiver can give their child everything they want to all the time, Radesky said.

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Health

Covid-19 is a leading cause of death for children in the US, despite relatively low mortality rate

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CNN
 — 

Covid-19 has become the eighth most common cause of death among children in the United States, according to a study published Monday.

Children are significantly less likely to die from Covid-19 than any other age group – less than 1% of all deaths since the start of the pandemic have been among those younger than 18, according to federal data. Covid-19 has been the third leading cause of death in the broader population.

But it’s rare for children to die for any reason, the researchers wrote, so the burden of Covid-19 is best understood in the context of other pediatric deaths.

“Pediatric deaths are rare by any measure. It’s something that that we don’t expect to happen and it’s a tragedy in a unique way. It’s a really profound event,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases.

“Everyone knows that Covid is the most severe in the elderly and immunocompromised and that it’s less severe in children, but that does not mean it’s a benign disease in children. Just because the numbers are so much lower in children doesn’t mean that they’re not impactful.”

In 2019, the last year before the pandemic, the leading causes of death among children and young adults ages 0 to 19 included perinatal conditions, unintentional injuries, congenital malformations or deformations, assault, suicide, malignant neoplasms, diseases of the heart and influenza and pneumonia.

The researchers’ analysis of data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that there were 821 Covid-19 deaths in this age group during a 12-month period from August 2021 to July 2022. That death rate – about 1 for every 100,000 children ages 0 to 19 – ranks eighth compared with the 2019 data. It ranks fifth among adolescents ages 15 to 19.

Covid-19 deaths displace influenza and pneumonia, becoming the top cause of death caused by any infectious or respiratory disease. It caused “substantially” more deaths than any vaccine-preventable disease historically, the researchers wrote.

According to CDC data, children are less vaccinated against Covid-19 than any other age group in the US. Less than 10% of eligible children have gotten their updated booster shot, and more than 90% of children under 5 are completely unvaccinated.

“If we looked at all those other leading causes of death – whether you’re talking about motor vehicle accidents or childhood cancer – and we said, ‘Gosh, if we had some simple, safe thing we could do to get rid of one of those, wouldn’t we just jump at it?” And we have that with Covid with vaccines,” said O’Leary, who is also a professor of pediatric infectious disease at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital Colorado.

A CDC survey of blood samples suggest that more than 90% of children have already had Covid-19 at least once.

There is uncertainty about exactly how much risk the virus will continue to pose, O’Leary said, but the potential benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh any potential risks.

“Vaccination clearly is our best option right now,” and the benefits clearly outweigh the risks, he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

The findings of the new study, published in JAMA Network Open, may underestimate the mortality burden of Covid-19 because the analysis focuses on deaths where Covid-19 was an underlying cause of death but not those where it may have been a contributing factor, the researchers wrote. Also, other analyses of excess deaths suggest that Covid-19 deaths have been underreported.

As Covid-19 continues to spread in the US, the researchers say that intervention methods such as vaccination and ventilation will “continue to play an important role in limiting transmission of the virus and mitigating severe disease.”

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Health

Surgeon General says 13 is ‘too early’ to join social media

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CNN
 — 

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says he believes 13 is too young for children to be on social media platforms, because although sites allow children of that age to join, kids are still “developing their identity.”

Meta, Twitter, and a host of other social media giants currently allow 13-year-olds to join their platforms.

“I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early … It’s a time where it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self-worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children,” Murthy said on “CNN Newsroom.”

The number of teenagers on social media has sparked alarm among medical professionals, who point to a growing body of research about the harm such platforms can cause adolescents.

Murthy acknowledged the difficulties of keeping children off these platforms given their popularity, but suggested parents can find success by presenting a united front.

“If parents can band together and say you know, as a group, we’re not going to allow our kids to use social media until 16 or 17 or 18 or whatever age they choose, that’s a much more effective strategy in making sure your kids don’t get exposed to harm early,” he told CNN.

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New research suggests habitually checking social media can alter the brain chemistry of adolescents.

According to a study published this month in JAMA Pediatrics, students who checked social media more regularly displayed greater neural sensitivity in certain parts of their brains, making their brains more sensitive to social consequences over time.

Psychiatrists like Dr. Adriana Stacey have pointed to this phenomenon for years. Stacey, who works primarily with teenagers and college students, previously told CNN using social media releases a “dopamine dump” in the brain.

“When we do things that are addictive like use cocaine or use smartphones, our brains release a lot of dopamine at once. It tells our brains to keep using that,” she said. “For teenagers in particular, this part of their brain is actually hyperactive compared to adults. They can’t get motivated to do anything else.”

Recent studies demonstrate other ways excessive screen time can impact brain development. In young children, for example, excessive screen time was significantly associated with poorer emerging literacy skills and ability to use expressive language.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, who recently published an op-ed in the Bulwark about loneliness and mental health, echoed the surgeon general’s concerns about social media. “We have lost something as a society, as so much of our life has turned into screen-to-screen communication, it just doesn’t give you the same sense of value and the same sense of satisfaction as talking to somebody or seeing someone,” Murphy told CNN in an interview alongside Murthy.

For both Murphy and Murthy, the issue of social media addiction is personal. Both men are fathers – Murphy to teenagers and Murthy to young children. “It’s not coincidental that Dr. Murthy and I are probably talking more about this issue of loneliness more than others in public life,” Murphy told CNN. “I look at this through the prism of my 14-year-old and my 11-year-old.”

As a country, Murphy explained, the U.S. is not powerless in the face of Big Tech. Lawmakers could make different decisions about limiting young kids from social media and incentivizing companies to make algorithms less addictive.

The surgeon general similarly addressed addictive algorithms, explaining pitting adolescents against Big Tech is “just not a fair fight.” He told CNN, “You have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending, you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers.”

Despite the hurdles facing parents and kids, Murphy struck a note of optimism about the future of social media.

“None of this is out of our control. When we had dangerous vehicles on the road, we passed laws to make those vehicles less dangerous,” he told CNN. “We should make decisions to make [social media] a healthier experience that would make kids feel better about themselves and less alone.”

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US

Memphis releases video showing Tyre Nichols calling for his mother, beaten by officers now charged in his death

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Editor’s Note: This article contains graphic videos and descriptions of violence.



CNN
 — 

Tyre Nichols screamed for his mother and Memphis police officers struck him multiple times – including in the face while his hands were restrained – toward the end of the Black man’s deadly encounter with the officers this month, video released by the city shows.

And although paramedics arrive minutes after officers disengage, Nichols appears to be left multiple times on the pavement without assistance before an ambulance comes.

The city on Friday night released body camera and surveillance video of the January 7 traffic stop and beating that led to the 29-year-old’s death in hospital from his injuries three days later. The release comes a day after five Memphis police officers, who also are Black and have been fired, were charged with murder.

The footage drew stunned reaction from law enforcement experts and outrage from officials including President Joe Biden, who said it was “yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day.”

Live updates: Memphis releases Tyre Nichols arrest videos

Protesters in Memphis took to Interstate 55 Friday night after the videos’ release, blocking both lanes of the highway’s bridge connecting the western Tennessee city to Arkansas.

The basics of Nichols’ encounter were this: Police pulled Nichols over in Memphis in what they initially said was on suspicion of reckless driving. After officers pulled him out of his car, a struggle ensued and he ran away; minutes later, officers would catch up with him and hit or kick him numerous times, video shows.

Moments from the videos include:

During the first encounter after the traffic stop, at around 8:24 p.m., Nichols sounded calm, body cam video from an officer arriving at the scene shows.

As the officer approaches the scene, an officer is yelling at Nichols to “Get the fuck out of the car.”

Officers pull Nichols out of the vehicle and someone is heard saying, “Get the fuck on the ground and turn his ass around.” Nichols responds by saying, “I didn’t do anything,” and, “Alright, I’m on the ground.”

Officers yell at him to lie down and threaten to tase him. One officer tells him, “Bitch put your (hands) behind your back before I break them.”

Nichols can be heard telling them, “You guys are doing a lot right now. … I’m just trying to go home. I am on the ground!”

At 8:25 p.m., one officer sprays Nichols in the face with pepper spray. Nichols then struggles to his feet and begins running from the officer as one another shoots a taser at him that apparently didn’t make contact.

A struggle ensues. Nichols gets up and runs, and the officers chase him.

A different body camera video shows some of what happens when officers catch Nichols on a neighborhood street minutes later, around 8:34 p.m.

Nichols screams for his mom as the video shows an officer arriving at this scene.

– Source:
CNN
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Video: Lawyer shares Nichols called out for his mom 3 times

Officers tell Nichols to “give them his hand,” as a struggle ensues on the ground. An officer asks Nichols, “Do you want to get sprayed again?”

Two officers hit and kick Nichols as he is on the ground.

Nichols screams: “Mooooom!” and continues to call for his mom for a while.

An officer is eventually heard yelling at Nichols: “I’m going to baton the fuck out of you. Give me your fucking hands.”

A remotely operated pole-mounted police surveillance video in the neighborhood gives the clearest view of the blows. This shows officers hitting Nichols at least nine times without visible provocation.

When the camera first turns toward the scene, an officer shoves Nichols hard to the pavement with a knee or leg. Nichols is pulled up by his shoulders and then kicked in the face twice.

After being pulled up into a sitting position, Nichols is hit in the back with what appears to be a nightstick. After being pulled to his knees, Nichols is hit again.

Once pulled to his feet, the video shows officers hitting Nichols in the face multiple times while his hands are restrained behind his body, after which he falls to his knees. Less than a minute later, an officer appears to kick Nichols. More than three minutes after the encounter is first seen on this camera, officers let go of Nichols, and he rolls on his back.

One minute later, Nichols is dragged along the pavement and propped up in a sitting position against the side of a car, where he is largely ignored by officers for the next three-and-a-half minutes.

In a body-camera video, officers can be heard talking about the encounter.

“He swung – pow – almost hit me,” one officer says. “Then he reached for (inaudible) gun,” a second officer says.

One officer says Nichols “had his hand on my gun,” and “motherfucker was holding it.”

An officer later describes the traffic stop involving Nichols: “We tried to get him stopped. He didn’t stop.”

An officer says: “He drove around, swerved, nearly hit my car.”

Van Jones, a former special adviser to President Barack Obama, put it this way to CNN after seeing the videos: “(Nichols) goes from a voice from calm (during the initial encounter) to panic … to agony.”

“It’s clearly excessive force,” former New York City police Lt. Darrin Porcher told CNN. “What’s even more troubling is, no officer was wiling to intervene and say, ‘Stop.’ “

Ten minutes into the pole-camera video – a few minutes after officers disengaged – a person who appears to be a paramedic engages Nichols for the first time, around 8:41 p.m. But responders would repeatedly walk away from Nichols before an ambulance arrives.

Two minutes after paramedics started attending to Nichols, he is seen falling over to the side and seeming to hit his head hard against a piece of equipment after a bright light was shone in his face. No one appears to help Nichols as he tries to sit up, only to fall over again.

About a minute later, officers are seen crowding around Nichols, only to step away as he again falls onto his side.

First responders then spend nearly five minutes standing over Nichols, and occasionally shining a light toward his face, before walking away.

Read stepfather’s description of video: ‘No one rendered aid to him’

Nichols twists on the ground, unhelped. Medical equipment is finally brought back to Nichols’ side about three minutes later, the pole-camera video shows.

Footage shows that 21 minutes pass from when paramedics first appeared to arrive to when an ambulance finally pulls into view of the camera at 9:02 p.m.

Two deputies with the Shelby County sheriff’s office have been put on leave pending an investigation after the sheriff viewed the videos Friday.

“I have concerns about two deputies who appeared on scene following the physical confrontation between police and Tyre Nichols,” Sheriff Floyd Bonner Jr. said.

“I have launched an internal investigation into the conduct of these deputies to determine what occurred and if any policies were violated. Both of these deputies have been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the administrative investigation.”

Earlier, two fire department employees who were part of Nichols’ “initial patient care” were put on leave “while an internal investigation is being conducted,” department spokesperson Qwanesha Ward told CNN’s Nadia Romero.

The US Department of Justice has said it is conducting a federal civil rights investigation of Nichols’ death.

Earlier Friday, Memphis’ police chief said the video would show “acts that defy humanity.”

Police have not been able to find anything to substantiate the probable cause for reckless driving by Nichols before his fatal encounter, Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis told CNN’s Don Lemon ahead of the videos’ release.

Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, told CNN on Friday before the videos were released: “It’s still like a nightmare right now.”

“I’m still trying to understand all of this and trying to wrap my head around all of this,” Wells said. “I don’t have my baby. I’ll never have my baby again.”

Police officials in a number of major cities nationwide have said they are monitoring for any possible public outcry this weekend over what will be seen in the video footage.

Police nationwide have been under scrutiny for how they treat Black people, particularly since the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the mass protest movement known as Black Lives Matter.

Before the videos’ were made public, Wells asked for supporters to be peaceful during demonstrations, saying at a vigil in Memphis on Thursday she wants “each and every one of you to protest in peace.”

“I don’t want us burning up our cities, tearing up the streets, because that’s not what my son stood for,” Wells said. “And if you guys are here for me and Tyre, then you will protest peacefully.”

A Memphis church is scheduled to hold Nichols’ funeral Wednesday.

The five Memphis police officers identified – Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Justin Smith, Emmitt Martin and Desmond Mills Jr. – were fired January 20 for violating police policies including on use of excessive force, police said.

They were then charged this week. Each has been charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, two charges of aggravated kidnapping, two charges of official misconduct and one charge of official oppression, Mulroy, the Shelby County district attorney, said.

Martin and Haley were released from jail on a $350,000 bond, according to Shelby County Jail records, while Smith, Bean and Mills Jr. have been released after each posting a $250,000 bond.

The five former officers are scheduled for arraignment on February 17.

Blake Ballin, an attorney for Mills Jr., one of the officers, said he doesn’t believe his client “is capable of” the accusations, and his client is “remorseful” to be “connected to the death” of Nichols.

Ballin told CNN he has not yet seen the video, but has spoken to people who have. He urged those who watch the video to “treat each of these officers as individuals.”

“The levels of culpability amongst these five officers are different, and I expect that you’re going to see in this video that my client Desmond Mills is not, in fact, guilty of the crimes he’s been charged with,” Ballin said.



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Business

Gautam Adani’s business loses $50 billion in market value after short seller report

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New Delhi
CNN
 — 

The value of Gautam Adani’s business empire has crashed by more than $50 billion this week since Hindenburg Research, a US firm that makes money from short selling, published a blistering report accusing it of fraud.

India’s Adani Group has denounced Hindenburg’s allegations as “baseless” and “malicious,” and it is considering legal action. But the sharp sell-off in shares, which began Wednesday, accelerated Friday after US hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said he found the short seller’s report credible.

Hindenburg Research published an investigation on Adani’s conglomerate late on Tuesday, accusing it of “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.” It said it had taken a short position in Adani Group companies, meaning it would benefit from a drop in their value.

Shares of those companies — some of which had surged over 500% in the last few years — plunged when India’s stock market opened Wednesday. The rout resumed Friday when trading resumed following a market holiday on Thursday.

Shares of Adani Transmission, Adani Total Gas and Adani Green Energy — three of the group’s seven listed companies — were down 20% each on Friday, while shares of Adani Enterprises, the conglomerate’s flagship company, fell 18%. Friday’s losses wiped out almost $39 billion in market value.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Adani is still Asia’s richest man with a personal fortune worth $113 billion, $30 billion more than fellow Indian entrepreneur Mukesh Ambani. Friday’s losses will reduce that gap.

Hindenburg said Thursday that it stood fully by its report and believed any legal action would be “meritless.”

“If Adani is serious, it should also file suit in the US where we operate. We have a long list of documents we would demand in a legal discovery process,” the short seller said in a post on Twitter.

Hindenburg isn’t the first research firm to express concern about the finances of Adani’s sprawling empire, which has borrowed $30 billion to become established in industries ranging from logistics to mining, and is aggressively growing in diverse sectors such as media, data centers, airports and cement.

Ackman weighed into the debate on Twitter Thursday, saying he found the Hindenburg investigation “highly credible and extremely well researched.”

“We are not invested long or short in any of the Adani companies … nor have we done our own independent research,” Ackman added.

Hindenburg’s claims come at a sensitive time. Adani Enterprises is aiming to raise 200 billion rupees ($2.5 billion) by issuing new shares this month. The offer will close on Tuesday.

A college dropout and a self-made industrialist, Adani is the world’s fourth richest man, ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. He is also seen as a close ally of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.

The 60-year old tycoon founded the Adani group over 30 years ago.



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Business

FDA vaccine advisers vote to harmonize Covid-19 vaccines in the United States

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CNN
 — 

A panel of independent experts that advises the US Food and Drug Administration on its vaccine decisions voted unanimously Thursday to update all Covid-19 vaccines so they contain the same ingredients as the two-strain shots that are now used as booster doses.

The vote means young children and others who haven’t been vaccinated may soon be eligible to receive two-strain vaccines that more closely match the circulating viruses as their primary series.

The FDA must sign off on the committee’s recommendation, which it is likely to do, before it goes into effect.

Currently, the US offers two types of Covid-19 vaccines. The first shots people get – also called the primary series – contain a single set of instructions that teach the immune system to fight off the original version of the virus, which emerged in 2019.

This index strain is no longer circulating. It was overrun months ago by an ever-evolving parade of new variants.

Last year, in consultation with its advisers, the FDA decided that it was time to update the vaccines. These two-strain, or bivalent, shots contain two sets of instructions; one set reminds the immune system about the original version of the coronavirus, and the second set teaches the immune system to recognize and fight off Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, which emerged in the US last year.

People who have had their primary series – nearly 70% of all Americans – were advised to get the new two-strain booster late last year in an effort to upgrade their protection against the latest variants.

The advisory committee heard testimony and data suggesting that the complexity of having two types of Covid-19 vaccines and schedules for different age groups may be one of the reasons for low vaccine uptake in the US.

Currently, only about two-thirds of Americans have had the full primary series of shots. Only 15% of the population has gotten an updated bivalent booster.

Data presented to the committee shows that Covid-19 hospitalizations have been rising for children under the age of 2 over the past year, as Omicron and its many subvariants have circulated. Only 5% of this age group, which is eligible for Covid-19 vaccination at 6 months of age, has been fully vaccinated. Ninety percent of children under the age of 4 are still unvaccinated.

“The most concerning data point that I saw this whole day was that extremely low vaccination coverage in 6 months to 2 years of age and also 2 years to 4 years of age,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Birth Defects and Infant Disorders. “We have to do much, much better.”

Cohn says that having a single vaccine against Covid-19 in the US for both primary and booster doses would go a long way toward making the process less complicated and would help get more children vaccinated.

Others feel that convenience is important but also stressed that data supported the switch.

“This isn’t only a convenience thing, to increase the number of people who are vaccinated, which I agree with my colleagues is extremely important for all the evidence that was related, but I also think moving towards the strains that are circulating is very important, so I would also say the science supports this move,” said Dr. Hayley Gans, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Stanford University.

Many others on the committee were similarly satisfied after seeing new data on the vaccine effectiveness of the bivalent boosters, which are cutting the risk of getting sick, being hospitalized or dying from a Covid-19 infection.

“I’m totally convinced that the bivalent vaccine is beneficial as a primary series and as a booster series. Furthermore, the updated vaccine safety data are really encouraging so far,” said Dr. David Kim, director of the the US Department of Health and Human Services’ National Vaccine Program, in public discussion after the vote.

Thursday’s vote is part of a larger plan by the FDA to simplify and improve the way Covid-19 vaccines are given in the US.

The agency has proposed a plan to convene its vaccine advisers – called the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC – each year in May or June to assess whether the instructions in the Covid-19 vaccines should be changed to more closely match circulating strains of the virus.

The time frame was chosen to give manufacturers about three months to redesign their shots and get new doses to pharmacies in time for fall.

“The object, of course – before anyone says anything – is not to chase variants. None of us think that’s realistic,” said Jerry Weir, director of the Division of Viral Products in the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review.

“But I think our experience so far, with the bivalent vaccines that we have, does indicate that we can continue to make improvements to the vaccine, and that would be the goal of these meetings,” Weir said.

In discussions after the vote, committee members were supportive of this plan but pointed out many of the things we still don’t understand about Covid-19 and vaccination that are likely to complicate the task of updating the vaccines.

For example, we now seem to have Covid-19 surges in the summer as well as the winter, noted Dr. Michael Nelson, an allergist and immunologist at the University of Virginia. Are the surges related? And if so, is fall the best time to being a vaccination campaign?

The CDC’s Dr. Jefferson Jones said that with only three years of experience with the virus, it’s really too early to understand its seasonality.

Other important questions related to the durability of the mRNA vaccines and whether other platforms might offer longer protection.

“We can’t keep doing what we’re doing,” said Dr. Bruce Gellin, chief of global public health strategy at the Rockefeller Foundation. “It’s been articulated in every one of these meetings despite how good these vaccines are. We need better vaccines.”

The committee also encouraged both government and industry scientists to provide a fuller picture of how vaccination and infection affect immunity.

One of the main ways researchers measure the effectiveness of the vaccines is by looking at how much they increase front-line defenders called neutralizing antibodies.

Neutralizing antibodies are like firefighters that rush to the scene of an infection to contain it and put it out. They’re great in a crisis, but they tend to diminish in numbers over time if they’re not needed. Other components of the immune system like B-cells and T-cells hang on to the memory of a virus and stand ready to respond if the body encounters it again.

Scientists don’t understand much about how well Covid-19 vaccination boosts these responses and how long that protection lasts.

Another puzzle will be how to pick the strains that are in the vaccines.

The process of selecting strains for influenza vaccines is a global effort that relies on surveillance data from other countries. This works because influenza strains tend to become dominant and sweep around the world. But Covid-19 strains haven’t worked in quite the same way. Some that have driven large waves in other countries have barely made it into the US variant mix.

“Going forward, it is still challenging. Variants don’t sweep across the world quite as uniform, like they seem to with influenza,” the FDA’s Weir said. “But our primary responsibility is what’s best for the US market, and that’s where our focus will be.”

Eventually, the FDA hopes that Americans would be able to get an updated Covid-19 shot once a year, the same way they do for the flu. People who are unlikely to have an adequate response to a single dose of the vaccine – such as the elderly or those with a weakened immune system – may need more doses, as would people who are getting Covid-19 vaccines for the first time.

At Thursday’s meeting, the advisory committee also heard more about a safety signal flagged by a government surveillance system called the Vaccine Safety Datalink.

The CDC and the FDA reported January 13 that this system, which relies on health records from a network of large hospital systems in the US, had detected a potential safety issue with Pfizer’s bivalent boosters.

In this database, people 65 and older who got a Pfizer bivalent booster were slightly more likely to have a stroke caused by a blood clot within three weeks of their vaccination than people who had gotten a bivalent booster but were 22 to 42 days after their shot.

After a thorough review of other vaccine safety data in the US and in other countries that use Pfizer bivalent boosters, the agencies concluded that the stroke risk was probably a statistical fluke and said no changes to vaccination schedules were recommended.

At Thursday’s meeting, Dr. Nicola Klein, a senior research scientist with Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, explained how they found the signal.

The researchers compared people who’d gotten a vaccine within the past three weeks against people who were 22 to 42 days away from their shots because this helps eliminate bias in the data.

When they looked to see how many people had strokes around the time of their vaccination, they found an imbalance in the data.

Of 550,000 people over 65 who’d received a Pfizer bivalent booster, 130 had a stroke caused by a blood clot within three weeks of vaccination, compared with 92 people in the group farther out from their shots.

The researchers spotted the signal the week of November 27, and it continued for about seven weeks. The signal has diminished over time, falling from an almost two-fold risk in November to a 47% risk in early January, Klein said. In the past few days, it hasn’t been showing up at all.

Klein said they didn’t see the signal in any of the other age groups or with the group that got Moderna boosters. They also didn’t see a difference when they compared Pfizer-boosted seniors with those who were eligible for a bivalent booster but hadn’t gotten one.

Further analyses have suggested that the signal might be happening not because people who are within three weeks of a Pfizer booster are having more strokes, but because people who are within 22 to 42 days of their Pfizer boosters are actually having fewer strokes.

Overall, Klein said, they were seeing fewer strokes than expected in this population over that period of time, suggesting a statistical fluke.

Another interesting thing that popped out of this data, however, was a possible association between strokes and high-dose flu vaccination. Seniors who got both shots on the same day and were within three weeks of those shots had twice the rate of stroke compared with those who were 22 to 42 days away from their shots.

What’s more, Klein said, the researchers didn’t see the same association between stroke and time since vaccination in people who didn’t get their flu vaccine on the same day.

The total number of strokes in the population of people who got flu shots and Covid-19 boosters on the same day is small, however, which makes the association a shaky one.

“I don’t think that the evidence are sufficient to conclude that there’s an association there,” said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, director of the CDC’s Immunization Safety Office.

Nonetheless, Richard Forshee, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Biostatistics and Pharmacovigilance, said the FDA is planning to look at these safety questions further using data collected by Medicare.

The FDA confirmed that the agency is taking a closer look.

“The purpose of the study is 1) to evaluate the preliminary ischemic stroke signal reported by CDC using an independent data set and more robust epidemiological methods; and 2) to evaluate whether there is an elevated risk of ischemic stroke with the COVID-19 bivalent vaccine if it is given on the same day as a high-dose or adjuvanted seasonal influenza vaccine,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

The FDA did not give a time frame for when these studies might have results.

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US

Tyre Nichols death: Multiple former Memphis polilce officers to be charged with murder, court records show

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CNN
 — 

[Breaking news update, published at 1:22 p.m. ET]

Multiple former Memphis police officers are facing charges, including second-degree murder, in the death of Tyre Nichols, according to Shelby County criminal court records.

[Original story, published at 12:40 p.m. ET]

Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy is set to provide an update on the investigation into the Memphis Police arrest of Tyre Nichols and his ensuing death at 2 p.m. CT Thursday that will include an announcement of criminal charges, a source close to the investigation told CNN’s Don Lemon.

The source also said authorities expect to release police video of the stop on Friday.

One of the five officers fired after Nichols’ death has been indicted and has surrendered, attorney William Massey said. Massey represents former officer Emmitt Martin III. The attorney said he does not yet know the nature of the charges.

Live updates on the Tyre Nichols case

The anticipated announcement of criminal charges comes about three weeks after Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, was hospitalized after a traffic stop and “confrontation” with Memphis police that family attorneys have called a savage beating.

Nichols died from his injuries on January 10, three days after the arrest, authorities said.

The five Memphis police officers, who are also Black, were fired for violating policies on excessive use of force, duty to intervene and duty to render aid, the department said. Other Memphis police officers are still under investigation for department policy violations related to the incident, the chief said.

Memphis Police Chief Cerelyn Davis condemned the actions of the arresting officers as “a failing of basic humanity” and called for peaceful protests ahead of the release of video of the arrest.

“This is not just a professional failing. This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual,” Davis said in a YouTube video Wednesday, her first on-camera comments about the arrest. “This incident was heinous, reckless, and inhumane, and in the vein of transparency, when the video is released in the coming days, you will see this for yourselves.”

The prosecutor has said a decision on whether to file charges is forthcoming. An attorney representing one of the officers will hold a news briefing after the district attorney’s update Thursday.

Authorities have not publicly released video of the arrest, but Nichols’ family and attorneys were shown the video on Monday. They said the footage shows officers severely beating Nichols and compared it to the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney King in 1991.

Nichols had “extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating,” according to the attorneys, citing preliminary results of an autopsy they commissioned.

Nichols’ arrest and ensuing death comes amid heightened scrutiny of how police treat Black people, particularly since the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the mass protest movement known as Black Lives Matter.

Davis, the first Black woman to serve as Memphis police chief, said she anticipated the release of the video in the coming days would cause public reaction and urged citizens to be nonviolent amid “our outrage and frustration.”

“I expect our citizens to exercise their First Amendment right to protest to demand action and results. But we need to ensure our community is safe in this process,” Davis said. “None of this is a calling card for inciting violence or destruction on our community or against our citizens.”

Law enforcement agencies nationwide are bracing for protests and potential unrest following the release of video, multiple sources told CNN. The Major Cities Chiefs Association, one of the leading professional law enforcement organizations, has convened several calls with member agencies, according to the group’s executive director, Laura Cooper.

A law enforcement source familiar with the national coordination told CNN that in at least one of those calls Memphis police told participants to be on alert for unrest. The source added there was an additional call among Washington, DC, law enforcement agencies to coordinate responses and share information.

Nichols, the father of a 4-year-old, had worked with his stepfather at FedEx for about nine months, his family said. He was fond of skateboarding in Shelby Farms Park, Starbucks with friends and photographing sunsets, and he had his mother’s name tattooed on his arm, the family said. He also had the digestive issue known as Crohn’s disease and so was a slim 140 to 145 pounds despite his 6-foot-3-inch height, his mother said.

On January 7, he was pulled over by Memphis officers on suspicion of reckless driving, police said in their initial statement on the incident. As officers approached the vehicle, a “confrontation” occurred and Nichols fled on foot, police said. The officers pursued him and they had another “confrontation” before he was taken into custody, police said.

Nichols then complained of shortness of breath, was taken to a local hospital in critical condition and died three days later, police said.

In Memphis police scanner audio, a person says there was “one male Black running” and called to “set up a perimeter.” Another message says “he’s fighting at this time.”

Attorneys for Nichols’ family who watched video of the arrest on Monday described it as a heinous police beating that lasted three long minutes. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said Nichols was tased, pepper-sprayed and restrained, and family attorney Antonio Romanucci said he was kicked.

“He was defenseless the entire time. He was a human piñata for those police officers. It was an unadulterated, unabashed, nonstop beating of this young boy for three minutes. That is what we saw in that video,” Romanucci said. “Not only was it violent, it was savage.”

The five officers who were terminated were identified by police as Martin, Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith. All joined the department in the last six years, police said.

In addition, two members of the city’s fire department who were part of Nichols’ “initial patient care” were relieved of duty, a fire spokesperson said. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced an investigation into Nichols’ death and the US Department of Justice and FBI have opened a civil rights investigation.

Video of the incident could be released this week or next week, Mulroy told CNN’s Laura Coates on Tuesday night, but he wants to make sure his office has interviewed everyone involved before releasing the video so it doesn’t have an impact on their statements.

Prosecutors are trying to expedite the investigation and may be able to make a determination on possible charges “around the same time frame in which we contemplate release of the video,” Mulroy said.

Nichols’ family wants the officers charged with murder, Romanucci told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday evening.



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