Tag Archives: Prevents

World

Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi testifies in court but a gag order prevents her defense from being made public

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Her courtroom testimony in the capital Naypyidaw, however, was not publicly available due to a gag order imposed on her legal team by the military junta.

The 76-year-old Nobel laureate was testifying at her trial on one of several charges brought against her. She had pleaded not guilty to the charge of incitement last month, alongside ousted President Win Myint, whose testimony on October 12 challenged the military’s insistence that no coup took place.

That charge stems from letters bearing their names that were sent to embassies urging them not to recognize the junta.

Suu Kyi, who was Myanmar’s state counselor and de facto leader of the country, has been hit with a raft of criminal charges that could see her put behind bars for decades if found guilty.

They include several charges of corruption — which carry a maximum prison sentence of 15 years — violating Covid-19 pandemic restrictions during the 2020 election campaign, illegally importing and possessing walkie talkies, and breaking the colonial-era Official Secrets Act — which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.

Myanmar’s state media — the mouthpiece of the junta — has not reported on Tuesday’s court proceedings and the hearings are closed to reporters and the public. The gag order imposed on Suu Kyi’s legal team means there is now little avenue for the world to know how her trial is progressing, or about her health.

In September, Suu Kyi appeared “dizzy” as she heard charges and was deemed too ill to attend court. Her lawyer in early October asked the court that hearings for each case be held every two weeks rather than every week, over concerns the busy schedule was having on her health, according to Reuters.

A military spokesperson did not answer CNN’s calls for comment.

Local media Myanmar Now reported that Suu Kyi “was able to defend her innocence very well.” CNN cannot independently verify the report.
Suu Kyi and her ruling National League for Democracy party was overthrown when the military seized power in a February 1 coup, ostensibly over alleged election irregularities. She has been held in detention at an undisclosed location in the capital since then. Her lawyers and supporters consider the charges against her to be politically motivated.
During his testimony last week, Win Myint, who was Myanmar’s head of state, told the court that senior military officials approached him on February 1 and told him to resign due to ill health.

Win Myint said he declined the proposal, saying he was in good health, according to his lawyer. Officers then threatened his decision would “cause harm” but Win Myint said he would rather die than consent, the lawyer told CNN.

The gag order on Suu Kyi and Win Myint’s lawyers was imposed following this hearing.

ASEAN snub over continued violence

Tuesday also marked the first day of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders summit in Brunei. The summit began without a representative from Myanmar after the bloc excluded Gen. Min Aung Hlaing from attending over a failure to end the violence, allow humanitarian aid into the country and give access to an ASEAN envoy.

Myanmar has been wracked by violence, unrest and humanitarian crises since the military, led by Min Aung Hlaing, seized power more than eight months ago.

In August, Min Aung Hlaing declared himself Prime Minister of a newly formed caretaker government and said elections would be held by 2023.
But there remains widespread public opposition to the junta. The months since the coup have been marked with widespread bloodshed and violence as the junta cracked down on nationwide pro-democracy protests, a prolonged civil disobedience movement and increasing conflict with “people’s defense forces” who are taking up arms against junta forces.

Almost 1,200 people have been killed by security forces since the coup, and nearly 9,200 have been arrested — including journalists, activists, protesters and anyone deemed in opposition of the military — with credible reports of torture, according to human rights and advocacy group the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

Last week, the military announced it was releasing 5,600 prisoners detained during the protests the coup. But dozens of political prisoners were re-arrested moments after being released, according to human rights groups and eyewitnesses.

The junta has also disputed the number of people killed since the coup and blames the violence on the National Unity Government (NUG) — which operates mainly from abroad or undercover and considers itself the legitimate government in Myanmar — and various ethnic armed organizations, which it labeled “terrorist groups.”

Cape Diamond contributed reporting.

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Health

Covid Vaccine Is Growing Less Effective, but Still Prevents Severe Disease: BioNTech

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Text size

BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin.


Bernd Von Jutrczenka/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

The protection provided by

Pfizer

and

BioNTech’s

Covid-19 vaccine is dropping due to the Delta variant, BioNTech’s CEO told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published Sunday, but most recipients are still protected against severe disease caused by the virus.

“The vaccine protection against the new variant is considerably lower,” BioNTech (ticker: BNTX) CEO
Dr. Ugur Sahin
told the Journal.

He said, however, that even though the protection against all symptomatic disease is dropping, protection against severe disease remains high, and most people may not yet need a third dose.

Read more: Will We Need Booster Shots? Study Raises Doubts

Sahin declined to take a position in the Journal interview on whether governments should authorize a booster dose of its vaccine. BioNTech’s partner

Pfizer

(PFE) has said it plans to ask the U.S. government to authorize a booster dose.

“This debate must proceed without us: We will only supply data and governments will need to tell us what they want,” Sahin told the Journal.

Read more: With Cases Rising, Travel’s Rebound Faces a Big Test

BioNTech shares were up 4% on Monday, and the stock is up 260% so far this year. Pfizer was flat, and is up 13.2% this year. The

S&P 500

was down 0.1%.

In recent weeks, as new cases of Covid-19 have climbed around the world, Pfizer has begun to push for authorization of a third dose of the vaccine. Health officials in Israel, meanwhile, have reported that the efficacy of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine at protecting against all symptomatic Covid-19 has dropped to 40.5% as Delta has become dominant in the country, though protection against hospitalization remains high, at 88%.

Read More: The Market for Booster Vaccines Just Keeps Getting Bigger

Federal health officials in the U.S. pushed back in mid-July against Pfizer’s assertion that it would submit a booster dose of its vaccine for emergency authorization. But late last week, a key advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention signaled early support for recommending a booster dose for immunocompromised people.

The World Health Organization’s director general, meanwhile, said last week that the world had squandered Covid-19 vaccines by failing to distribute them more equally around the world, and called the notion of administering booster shots a “moral outrage.”

“Some of the richest countries are now talking about third booster shots for their populations, while health-workers, older people, and other vulnerable groups in the rest of the world continue to go without,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom last Wednesday. “This is not just a moral outrage; it’s also epidemiologically and economically self-defeating. The longer this discrepancy persists, the longer the pandemic will drag on.”

Read more: Rising Covid Cases Put Economic Recovery at Risk

BioNTech’s Sahin has long warned that boosters could be necessary. He told Barron’s for a feature published in April that patients may need to be redosed with the vaccine six to nine months after their second dose, and then every 12 to 18 months after that. And in an interview at Barron’s Investing in Tech conference in June, he said that antibody responses in people who had received the vaccine were stable for four or five months after the second dose, and then at six months the antibody levels begin to drop. Redosing boosts those levels again.

“At the end of the day it’s also a decision of the governments when to introduce the booster shot for the population,” Sahin said in June.

In his comments to the Journal, BioNTech’s Sahin also said that he was staying out of the debate over whether countries should authorize booster doses. 

“When the vaccine becomes available on the free market everyone will be able to make this decision for themselves,” he said.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com

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Business

Israel: Pfizer vaccine allows infection but prevents severe illness

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A new study released this week from Israel’s Health Ministry found that while the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is highly effective at preventing severe COVID-19 cases caused by the delta variant, it was much less effective than the health agency previously thought at protecting people from infection.

The study, conducted from June 20 to July 17, with results released in a report Thursday, found that the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech inoculation was roughly 88 percent effective at preventing hospitalization due to the delta variant and about 91 percent effective at protecting against severe cases.

However, the Israeli health agency said that for symptomatic COVID-19 cases, the vaccine was found to offer just about 41 percent protection against the delta variant, with an overall effectiveness of 39 percent for preventing delta variant infections. 

The new percentage is much lower than the 64 percent effectiveness against delta variant infections that Israel reported earlier this month. 

The previous figure drew widespread skepticism from health experts, who argued that mRNA vaccines like the Pfizer shot have repeatedly been shown to offer strong protection against COVID-19 variants. 

The initial Israeli report was also challenged by a Public Health England study released Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine that found that the two-dose Pfizer vaccine was 88 percent effective against the delta variant. 

In comparison, the U.K. health agency said that the AstraZeneca vaccine was 67 percent effective at preventing infection from the delta strain. 

Ran Balicer, chairman of Israel’s national expert advisory team on the COVID-19 response, said in a statement along with the Thursday report that their data could have been skewed, citing the ways in which vaccinated groups of people were tested versus those who had not been vaccinated.

“The heavily skewed exposure patterns in the recent outbreak in Israel, which are limited to specific population sectors and localities,” mean that some factors may not be accounted for, he said, according to Bloomberg. 

“We are trying to complement this research approach with additional ones, taking additional personal characteristics into account,” Balicer added before noting that “this takes time and larger case numbers.”

Pfizer said in a Friday statement that it was confident in the protection offered by its two-dose vaccine, with BioNTech telling Bloomberg that it was reviewing the Israeli government’s data. 

Israeli studies on the vaccine’s effectiveness against the delta variant were previously used by Pfizer earlier this month to suggest that people may eventually need a booster shot, though U.S. health officials have said it is not necessary at this time. 

An advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met Thursday morning to discuss whether it should recommend a booster COVID-19 shot for people who are immunocompromised.



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Health

Pfizer Vaccine Less Effective Against Delta Infections but Prevents Severe Illness, Israeli Data Show

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TEL AVIV—Data from Israel suggests Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine is less effective at protecting against infections caused by the Delta variant of Covid-19 but retains its potency to prevent severe illness from the highly contagious strain.

The vaccine protected 64% of inoculated people from infection during an outbreak of the Delta variant, down from 94% before, according to Israel’s Health Ministry. It was 94% effective at preventing severe illness in the same period, compared with 97% before, the ministry said.

An Israeli official said Tuesday the health ministry findings released a day earlier were preliminary and based on data collected from June 6 through early July. The ministry didn’t release its methodology or the data on which its findings were based.

A spokesman for Pfizer said he couldn’t comment on an unpublished survey, but pointed to a recent study that showed the vaccine continued to offer protection against new variants.

The findings came as new cases of Covid-19 in Israel rose to a seven-day average of 300 on Tuesday from around 10 a day for most of last month. To prevent another surge in infections, the government late last month reimposed an indoor mask requirement and other measures after finding that about 90% of the new infections were likely caused by the Delta variant. Israel’s total population is around 9.3 million.

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Entertainment

Dr. Laura Berman says Apple policy prevents access to son’s iPhone after overdose

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Relationship therapist and television host Dr. Laura Berman and her husband are unable to access their recently deceased son’s cellphone, and must provide Apple with a death certificate before receiving the necessary approval to do so, according to a report.

Berman, a doctor and award-winning radio and television host, told NBC for a segment that aired Tuesday that she and her husband, Sam Chapman, have been left with no choice but to wait for Apple to allow them to access their 16-year-old son’s iPhone because they don’t have the passcode.

The teen, Samuel “Sammy” Berman Chapman, was pronounced dead on Sunday after his mother discovered him unconscious in the bedroom of his Santa Monica, Calif., home shortly before 4:30 p.m. local time, police and reports said.

In a heartbreaking post shared on her Instagram, Berman explained how they have reason to believe he suffered a drug overdose.

“My beautiful boy is gone. 16 years old. Sheltering at home,” she wrote in a caption paired with a photograph of her and Sammy. She later added: “My heart is completely shattered and I am not sure how to keep breathing. I post this now only so that not one more kid dies.”

Berman wrote that she and her husband learned their son had been messaging with a drug dealer via Snapchat and is suspected to have taken drugs, possibly Xanax or Percocet, that were laced with something more dangerous than he realized, likely fentanyl.

“I know he did not know he was taking fentanyl. He was not interested in that; he was scared of it,” she told Fox News on Tuesday. “He did not actively understand addiction and did not want to be addicted yet, unfortunately, most American teenagers experiment in these fentanyl-laced, supposedly relatively innocent experimental drugs.”

A toxicology report will provide additional answers.

(Photo courtesy of Samuel Chapman)
(Photo courtesy of Samuel Chapman)

OWN HOST DR. LAURA BERMAN WARNS PARENTS ABOUT OPIOID CRISIS FOLLOWING TEEN SON’S APPARENT FENTANYL OVERDOSE

But the grieving parents are unable to now search further on their son’s phone because an Apple policy prevents the company from unlocking his cellphone until a death certificate is provided, TODAY reported.

An Apple spokesperson did not respond to Fox News’ request seeking comment and additional details regarding the policy.

Meanwhile, she told Fox News tech companies and social media platforms need “to help the police get the predators that are killing our children.”

“Snapchat is very clear that they don’t support drug dealing and I’m sure whenever their algorithm finds a page advertising drug dealing they take it down,” she said, “but that doesn’t stop the drug dealer They’re like whack-a-moles. They just pop up with a new account seconds later.”

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – MAY 24: Dr Laura Berman arrives at the 36th Annual Gracie Awards Gala on May 24, 2011 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Valerie Macon/Getty Images)

Berman said the family has not heard from Snapchat but holds the company accountable for “catching the one that did it and the ones that are doing it to other children and parents around the country,” she said.

SNAPCHAT RESPONDS AFTER OWN HOST DR. LAURA BERMAN’S SON’S DEATH

“I don’t hold them accountable for his death but I hold them accountable for his justice,” she added.

A Snapchat spokesperson did not respond to Fox News’ request seeking comment on Tuesday, but said in a statement Monday that the company’s “deepest sympathies are with the family and friends of Samuel Berman Chapman and we are heartbroken by his passing.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“We are committed to working together with law enforcement in this case and in all instances where Snapchat is used for illegal purposes,” the statement continued. “We have zero-tolerance for using Snapchat to buy or sell illegal drugs.”

The Santa Monica Police Department told Fox News on Tuesday the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division is conducting a “parallel investigation” with the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office and the investigation is ongoing. The Los Angeles Office of the Drug Enforcement Agency has also offered its assistance, a DEA spokesperson said.

Fox News’ Melissa Roberto and David Aaro contributed to this report.

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Health

J&J 1-Dose Shot Prevents COVID-19; ‘COVID Tongue’ May Be Symptom – NBC Chicago

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Authorities announced Thursday two people in South Carolina have been diagnosed with a more infectious strain of the coronavirus first detected in South Africa. It’s the first time the variant has been reported in the U.S.

Also Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report that found the state may have undercounted COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50%. New York experienced the first major outbreak of the coronavirus last spring, and nursing homes were hit especially hard.

More than 430,000 people have died and more than 25.7 million cases have been reported in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic, according to NBC News.

Here are the latest coronavirus updates from the U.S. and elsewhere:

Johnson & Johnson’s COVID Vaccine Provides Strong Protection Against COVID-19, Was Less Effective Against New Variant

Johnson & Johnson says its vaccine appears to protect against COVID-19 with just one shot. It’s not as strong as some two-shot rivals but still potentially helpful for a world in dire need of more doses.

Results released Friday show the single-shot vaccine was 66% effective overall at preventing moderate to severe illness, and much more protective against the most serious symptoms.

The vaccine worked better in the U.S. compared to South Africa, where it was up against a tougher, mutated virus.. The company says it will file an application for emergency use soon in the U.S., and then abroad.

Read the full story here.

‘COVID Tongue’ May Be Another Virus Symptom, British Researcher Suggests

There may be another addition to the growing list of strange possible symptoms of the new coronavirus: “COVID tongue.”

A British researcher who is helping to track COVID-19 warning signs is reporting more cases of infected people complaining of tongue discoloration, enlargement and other mouth problems, NBC News reports.

“Seeing increasing numbers of Covid tongues and strange mouth ulcers. If you have a strange symptom or even just headache and fatigue stay at home!” Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, tweeted this month.

He believes more than a third of COVID-19 patients, 35 percent, have non-classic symptoms of the disease in the first three days, so it’s important to draw attention to skin rashes, Covid toes and other warning signs that “go ignored,” he wrote.

Spector did not reply to a request for comment, but other researchers have also reported tongue and mouth symptoms linked with the new coronavirus.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com

NJ Hospital Gave Early COVID Vaccines to Donors, Executives’ Relatives: Report

Some of the first people to get COVID-19 vaccinations at a New Jersey medical center were the relatives of top hospital executives and some of its trustees and donors, according to a published report.

The shots were administered by Hunterdon Medical Center in December and early January, at a time when only front-line health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities were eligible, NBC New York reports.

A registry of vaccine recipients, obtained by New Jersey 101.5 FM, indicated that shots had gone to two longtime donors to the hospital and at least seven spouses and two adult children of medical directors, administrators or executives at the health care network. The radio station said it was given the registry by a whistleblower, who it did not identify.

Some of the recipients were in their 20s, an age group unlikely to qualify for the vaccine for many months.

A hospital spokesperson said donors and board members weren’t given preference over eligible staff or at-risk individuals who were available, but that they received the vaccine when eligible recipients couldn’t be located rather than have the vaccine doses go to waste.

Read the full story here



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