“It’s really sad to see our children having to sleep on floors. People are sitting, waiting in hallways, waiting outside, and right now we just need people to come together. People are tired,” Wilson said at the news conference.
As the FDA’s top official overseeing vaccines, Prasad is now in position to reverse what he recently called “a number of missteps” in how the FDA assessed the benefits and risks of COVID-19 boosters.He questioned how much benefit yearly vaccinations continue to offer. In a podcast shortly before assuming his FDA job, Prasad suggested companies could study about 20,000 older adults in August or September to show if an updated vaccine prevented COVID-related hospitalizations.
There is “legitimate debate about who should be boosted, how frequently they should be boosted and the value of boosting low-risk individuals,” said Hopkins’ Adalja. But he stressed that CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has the proper expertise to be making those decisions.And other experts say simply updating the strain that a COVID-19 vaccine targets doesn’t make it a new product — and real-world data shows each fall’s update has offered benefit.“The data are clear and compelling” that vaccination reduces seniors’ risk of hospitalization and serious illness for four to six months, said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota infectious disease researcher.
Nor could that kind of study be accomplished quickly enough to get millions of people vaccinated before the yearly winter surge, said Dr. Jesse Goodman of Georgetown University, a former FDA vaccine chief.“You’d always be doing clinical trials and you’d never have a vaccine that was up to date,” he said.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In just two months as the federal health secretary,NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A Pennsylvania man who was going through security at a New Jersey airport was found to have a live turtle concealed in his pants, according to the federal Transportation Security Administration.
The turtle was detected Friday after a body scanner alarm went off at Newark Liberty International Airport. A TSA officer then conducted a pat-down on the East Stroudsburg man and determined there was something concealed in the groin area of his pants.When questioned further, the man reached into his pants and pulled out the turtle, which was about 5 inches (12 centimeters) long and wrapped in a small blue towel. He said it was a red-ear slider turtle, a species that is popular as a pet.
The man — whose name was not released — was escorted from the checkpoint area by Port Authority police and ended up missing his flight. The turtle was confiscated, and it’s not clear if the turtle was the man’s pet or why he had it in his pants.AP correspondent Julie Walker reports TSA agents find a man with a live turtle concealed in his pants.