Tag: Postpones

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Health

CDC panel postpones pause choice

CDC panel postpones pause decision

A panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided on Wednesday to postpone a decision on Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine while investigating cases of six women developing a rare but potentially life-threatening bleeding disorder, where one person is dead and one is critical condition.

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices met the day after the Food and Drug Administration requested states to temporarily “cease” use of J & J’s vaccine “out of caution.” The panel unanimously voted to meet in a week’s time to decide what to recommend to the CDC about J & J’s vaccine.

The postponement means the pause for J & J’s vaccine will remain in place.

The committee debated whether and how long they wanted to continue the hiatus on J & J’s vaccine while the CDC investigates the cause of the clotting. One committee member recommended a month-long hiatus from resuming vaccinations, while other members recommended a few weeks. Some members asked if they could hold the vote on hold until they had more time to process the data.

One of the options the panel considered was whether it should recommend restricting the use of the vaccine based on age or other risk factors.

Dr. Grace Lee, a member of the committee, said she feared a vote to suspend the use of the vaccine indefinitely would send the wrong message to the public. She and others added it might appear that something is fundamentally wrong with the vaccine.

“This is not the decision that I think makes the most sense,” she said.

Sandra Fryhofer of the American Medical Association advocated taking a break. She said there are enough supplies of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to keep the rapid vaccinations going in the US

“I know there are a lot of patients who couldn’t be vaccinated and need to be vaccinated, but we want to make sure these vaccines are safe,” she said.

Dr. Nirav Shah, the director of the CDC in Maine, said the committee’s vote to postpone a decision on how to use the vaccine was “a decision”.

“Any extension of the hiatus will invariably result in the most vulnerable people in the US, who were prime candidates for the J&J vaccine, remaining at risk. The most at risk will remain at risk.”

The CDC and FDA advised states to postpone dates for J&J vaccines after six women developed cerebral sinus thrombosis (CVST) within about two weeks of receiving the shot, U.S. health officials told reporters Tuesday. CVST is a rare form of stroke that occurs when a blood clot forms in the venous sinuses of the brain. It can eventually leak blood into the brain tissue and cause bleeding.

“CVST is rare but clinically severe and can lead to significant morbidity and mortality,” said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC official, told the committee. He said CVST cases in the J&J vaccine group appeared to be three times higher than in women aged 20 to 50 with similar backgrounds.

Within hours of the FDA’s warning early Tuesday, more than a dozen states, as well as a few national pharmacies, suspended vaccinations with J & J’s vaccine, with some replacing scheduled appointments with either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

U.S. health officials had said the break in using the vaccine could only be a few days, depending on what they learned when investigating the cases. The Chief Medical Officer of the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday the hiatus in vaccine use would give US health officials the time they need to thoroughly investigate the cases and “find some common ground among the women involved”.

A 25-year-old male developed CVST along with bleeding during the clinical study. He was hospitalized but recovered. All six cases that appeared after the clinical trial were found in white women, Shimabukuro said, noting that the median time to symptoms was eight days. Three were described as obese, one had hyperthyroidism, one had asthma, and one had high blood pressure, he said.

Five of the six patients developed headaches initially and one had back pain and bruising before developing more serious other symptoms, he said. One of the women died. Three of the patients are staying in the hospital while two have been discharged, he said.

“These are significant blood clots that are causing these problems,” he said.

Dr. Aaran Maree, chief physician of the vaccines division at J&J, Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos., Told the committee that none of the women were on birth control, which has been suggested as a possible association with blood clotting. They all also tested negative for Covid-19.

One of the two patients who recovered was a 26-year-old woman who was described as “overweight but active”, who was not on medication, and had no history of bleeding disorders.

She was hospitalized and discharged with a severe headache a week after receiving the J&J vaccine, but returned to the hospital a week later with abdominal pain and a fast heart rate, he said. Tests showed that she developed thrombocytopenia or low platelet levels and CVST.

A 48-year-old woman with an “unremarkable medical history” was admitted to the hospital after three days with malaise and abdominal pain. She developed severe thrombocytopenia and CVST which, despite treatment with the blood-thinning heparin, progressed to a hemorrhagic stroke. She received the J&J vaccine two weeks before symptoms began and is still critically ill, according to the latest report.

Categories
Politics

Decide Postpones Guantanamo Arraignments Over Covid Considerations

Judge Postpones Guantanamo Arraignments Over Covid Concerns

WASHINGTON – A military judge Tuesday indefinitely postponed indictments against three Guantánamo Bay prisoners who were due to appear in court for the first time after 17 years in prison. The coronavirus pandemic made traveling to the naval base too risky.

Indonesian prisoner Hambali, who has been held as a former leader of a Southeast Asian extremist group since 2003, and two accused accomplices were due to appear before the court martial on February 22nd. But Colonel Charles L. Pritchard Jr., the military judge who was due to travel to Guantanamo this week, ruled that “the various lawyers’ beliefs that travel is a serious threat to their health” was baseline.

Colonel Pritchard is the youngest military judge to join the Bank of Guantánamo Military Commissions and the youngest to postpone a trial deemed too risky in almost a year of the coronavirus repeal. The capital punishment pre-trial hearings against five men charged with planning the September 11, 2001 attacks have been delayed by a year.

The judge, court staff and attorneys in charge of the hearing began quarantine in the Washington area the weekend before a charter flight to the base Thursday.

Once there, the passengers should be quarantined individually for 14 days according to a plan worked out by the public prosecutor’s office in order to protect the residents of 6,000 inhabitants and in prison from the risk of infection.

“The risk to the health and safety of those involved in the legal proceedings due to the global Covid-19 pandemic is high,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order on Tuesday. “The government’s proposed mitigation measures lower the risk, but the risk remains.” He suggested that traveling to the base may not be safe until the end of summer.

Updated

Apr. 2, 2021, 7:52 p.m. ET

The case had been inactive throughout the Trump administration, but on day two of the Biden administration, a senior Pentagon official appointed under the Trump administration in charge of military commissions cleared the prosecution.

The defendants include Mr. Hambali, charged as Encep Nurjaman and the former leader of the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah, and his accused accomplices, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, who are Malaysians.

The three men were captured in Thailand in 2003 on charges of conspiracy in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali that killed 202 people, and in the 2003 Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombing in which at least 11 people were killed and at least 80 injured were indicted for their first three years on the CIA’s secret network of prisoners before being brought to Guantánamo for trial in 2006.

Military commission rules require an inmate to be tried within 30 days of the charges being approved, but the judge’s decision appeared to suspend this watch.

Colonel Pritchard, the head of the Army’s southeastern judicial district, was forced to travel to Washington last week to be quarantined before traveling to Guantánamo. In his decision, he noted that most of the people traveling to the court hearings have not yet been vaccinated against the virus, and neither have the prisoners.

He also noted Saturday’s decision by the Biden government to suspend a plan to offer vaccines to the 40 inmates in the prison this week. Under the original plan, the three defendants could have voluntarily received their February 1 shots and boosters in time for the February 22 trial.

By Tuesday, all soldiers and other service members working on the prison operation had been offered the Moderna vaccine, said Maj. Gregory J. McElwain, an Army spokesman, and declined to say how many of the estimated 1,500 troops are refused to receive this one shot. The Navy’s medical staff has been gradually vaccinating volunteers among residents of the base since Jan. 9.

This week, as part of the tiered program, the vaccines were offered to school teachers and foreign workers of the base commissioner and bars, as well as the naval forces guarding the perimeter of the base.

Prosecutors suggested that the hearing be postponed to April 3. The judge wrote that he would issue a new court order “in due course”.

Categories
World News

N.Y.C. Postpones Vaccine Appointments As Winter Storm Approaches

N.Y.C. Postpones Vaccine Appointments As Winter Storm Approaches

Vaccination sites in the New York subway area will close on Monday due to an impending winter storm that is expected to throw up to 16 inches of snow on the area.

Winter storm warnings were issued on Sunday for much of the eastern United States, disrupting vaccinations in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New Jersey and elsewhere.

Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he did not want older New Yorkers on their way to vaccinations and warned of blizzard-like conditions with gusty winds. The vaccinations scheduled for Tuesday in New York City have not been canceled for the time being, de Blasio said.

The storm will temporarily disrupt the vaccine rollout in New York City, which is plagued by inadequate supplies, faulty registration systems, and confusion over the state’s stringent licensing policies. The vaccine is available to residents aged 65 and over, as well as a large number of workers classified as “essential”.

About 800,000 doses have been administered in the city so far, de Blasio said.

Vaccine appointments at multiple locations in the area – the Javits Center in Manhattan, the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, a transit point on Jones Beach on Long Island, SUNY Stony Brook and the Westchester County Center – are postponed for this week, according to a statement from this week Melissa DeRosa, a top advisor to Governor Andrew Cuomo. “We are asking all New Yorkers to monitor the weather and stay out of the streets tomorrow so our crews and first responders can do their jobs safely,” she said.

In the Philadelphia area, urban testing and vaccination sites will be closed on Monday. Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and parts of the DC, Maryland, and Virginia areas followed suit. Some areas outside the center of the storm were expected to remain open for vaccination, including parts of Massachusetts and New York state.

In Oregon, a storm on Tuesday resulted in a group of health officials hauling vaccines to be offered to drivers stuck on the side of the road shortly before their expiration date.

The rollout in New York City was also hampered by distribution problems and severe racial differences, according to de Blasio, with residents of black and Latino receiving far fewer doses than residents of white.

The city’s demographics were incomplete, but the numbers so far have been remarkable: of the nearly 300,000 city dwellers who received a dose and whose race was recorded, about 48 percent were white, 15 percent were Latinos, 15 percent were Asian, and 11 percent were black . The Latino and Black residents were underrepresented: the city’s population is 29 percent Latinos and 24 percent black.

Attempts to provide more vaccination kits to underserved communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx, including churches and public housing areas, were also delayed this week as six pop-up locations in the two counties were moved to Wednesday. Ms. DeRosa said.

Categories
Entertainment

‘Nutcracker’ in Could? The Virus Postpones a Christmas Custom

‘Nutcracker’ in May? The Virus Postpones a Christmas Tradition

CHICAGO – In the world of amateur ballet, each year has a familiar rhythm. Ballet academies hold auditions for The Nutcracker in the fall, and as winter approaches, the young dancers learn how to be toy soldiers, angels, or mice. Just before Christmas, when the ballet takes place, it is time to perform.

This year, with the pandemic, many ballet schools have given up the tradition entirely. But an academy in downtown Chicago owned by two Russian ballet teachers who ran the Joffrey Academy of Dance for years decided to find a way to assemble a “Nutcracker” – no matter how complicated it got.

Young ballerinas wore masks on their faces and numbers on their jerseys and played at the A&A Ballet Academy in September. Alexei Kremnev and Anna Reznik, the owners of the school, set out to create a “nutcracker” for a socially distant age: they shrank the line-up, cut off the partnership, cut production to avoid interruptions, and swore, only about 7 percent of the plays sell seats. They persevered even if a young dancer had a confirmed case of Covid-19 and had two other symptoms and moved the samples to Zoom for some time.

Then, about two weeks before the reduced throng of parents and grandparents were due to arrive for the scheduled performances, a spate of Covid cases caused the state to close all theaters again.

Unimpressed, Mr. Kremnev and Ms. Reznik came up with a simple solution: Why not postpone “Nutcracker” to May if they hope that there will be fewer restrictions?

The idea of ​​moving the most Christmassy ballet into spring may seem unsettling. Set on Christmas Eve, “The Nutcracker” usually features a towering Christmas tree and dancing snowflakes, making it an annual holiday tradition around the world. But Mr. Kremnev and Mrs. Reznik don’t see why it has to be that way. After all, Handel’s “Messiah”, the ultimate Christmas Oratorio, was originally considered Easter music.

And ballet companies have not always limited their “Nutcracker” performances to the Christmas season, especially in the Soviet Union and Russia, where the ballet with its glorious Tchaikovsky score premiered in St. Petersburg in 1892. During this very first performance in December, when a new “Nutcracker” production was being assembled in what was then Leningrad in 1934, the premiere was in February. And in March 1966, the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow unveiled a new production.

“For them it was just another ballet – and not the most successful ballet,” said Jennifer Fisher, dance historian and author of Nutcracker Nation. “Once it’s planted here in San Francisco in 1944 and in New York in 1954, it becomes an annual production, always at Christmas.”

Even in the US it wasn’t always limited to winter: in 1977 Mikhail Baryshnikov’s “Nutcracker” was performed for the American Ballet Theater in May after a more traditional world premiere in Washington, New York in December.

Mr. Kremnev and Ms. Reznik said that when they lived in Russia it was customary to play “Nutcrackers” throughout the season, usually September to May, so this year’s shift doesn’t feel strange to them.

“It was a repertoire like ‘Spartacus’ or ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’,” said Kremnev.

In May, when the temperature rises and, with a bit of luck, the virus subsides, the dancers from A&A Ballet, their furry mouse suits, their Tricorn soldiers’ hats, and the weirdly large skirt of Mother Ginger can break out – assuming the theaters in Chicago it is allowed to reopen.

For Mr. Kremnev (50) and Ms. Reznik (52), who are married, reopening their studio in the summer was a challenge in itself. It was often difficult to determine where classes and rehearsals fit into the state’s gradual reopening plan. (Is a ballet academy more of a fitness class or a camp?) However, they ran an intensive program in their studio in July, and a city inspector visited the program to make sure the program was in line with state guidelines.

When it came time for their “Art Deco Nutcracker” set in 1920s America, the couple were keen to keep the show operating by rules designed to stop its spread. In September no more than 10 artists could rehearse at the same time. They planned a cast of around 75 dancers, half the size of the usual. And they would only occupy about 7 percent of the 725 seats in the Studebaker Theater, which would be anything but a financial success.

Then there were the changes to the ballet itself. Mr. Kremnev, who choreographed “The Art Deco Nutcracker” in 2017, removed all partnerships and close contacts between the young dancers. The Sugarplum Fairy could no longer dance the pas de deux with her Cavalier, and the trio of Russian dancers performing in the second act could no longer embrace each other.

During rehearsals, the ballet teachers could no longer bring the dancers’ bodies into the correct positions.

“Usually they’re very handy,” said Grace Curry, a 17-year-old dancer who plays both Clara and the Sugarplum Fairy in a variety of lineups. “They move your leg where they want, they put your foot in the right position. But this year they couldn’t. “

The dancers, ages 4 to 24, were disappointed with the sudden cancellation of the show, but Mr. Kremnev and Ms. Reznik were relatively unimpressed.

Her production of “Nutcracker” isn’t really about the performances or the ticket revenue. It’s about getting the students in the studio to train, learn the choreography and learn to perform in sync with the others.

“It really doesn’t matter if we do it,” said Ms. Reznik. “I always tell my students that everything we do in the studio can be used for the future.”

But they will assure the dancers and their families that they intend to make “Nutcrackers” a Christmas tradition – in 2021.