Pause on Johnson & Johnson’s Vaccine Fuels New Concerns

 To federal health officials, asking states on Tuesday to suspend use of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine until they could investigate six extremely rare but troubling cases of blood clots was an obvious and perhaps unavoidable move.

But where scientists saw prudence, public health officials saw a delicate trade-off: The blood clotting so far appears to affect just one out of every million people injected with the vaccine, and it is not yet clear if the vaccine is the cause. If highlighting the clotting heightens vaccine hesitancy and helps conspiracy theorists, the “pause” could ultimately sicken — and even kill — more people than it saves.

“It’s a messaging nightmare,” said Rachael Piltch-Loeb, an expert in health risk communications at the N.Y.U. School of Global Public Health. But officials had no other ethical option, she added. “To ignore it would be to seed the growing sentiment that public health officials are lying to the public.”

Russia - 4 die after covid shot.

 Four people recently died in Russia shortly after taking the Sputnik V anti-corona jab in previously unreported cases, which are being taken "seriously" by the EU regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in Amsterdam.

Six other Russians also had medical complications after taking the vaccine, according to internal case files from RosPotrebNadzor, a Russian body responsible for administering vaccinations, seen by EUobserver

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Three of the deceased were women aged 51, 69, and 74.

The fourth one was not identified in the leaked files.

The deaths were heart, lung, or blood-sugar related and might or might not have been caused by Sputnik V, the dossier of Russian documents indicated.

Top Chinese official admits vaccines have low effectiveness

 BEIJING (AP) — China’s top disease control official, in a rare acknowledgement, said current vaccines offer low protection against the coronavirus and mixing them is among strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness.

China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of domestically made vaccines abroad and is relying on them for its own mass immunization campaign.

But the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, said at a conference Saturday their efficacy rates needed improving.

“We will solve the issue that current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,” Gao said in a presentation on Chinese COVID-19 vaccines and immunization strategies at a conference in the southwestern city of Chengdu. “It’s now under consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process.”

Denmark to return 500 Syrians back to Syria!

 COPENHAGEN: Denmark is facing growing criticism for a decision last year to revoke residence permits for Syrian refugees, citing a “safe” situation around Damascus, but the country is sticking to its position.

The tough Danish stance is a new sign of the country now having one of Europe’s most restrictive migration policies.

“No other country in Europe has adopted such a policy,” Niels-Erik Hansen, a lawyer specializing in migration issues, told AFP.
In the last election in 2019, the Social Democrats, headed by Mette Frederiksen, adopted a restrictive line on immigration and managed to take power from the conservative government propped up by the far-right Danish People’s Party.
Widespread indifference toward the policy change in the Scandinavian country was upended in early April, after one of Hansen’s clients, a teenager about to graduate secondary school, pleaded for her case on Danish television.
Speaking in fluent Danish, 19-year-old Aya Abu-Daher moved viewers as she asked, holding back tears, what she had “done wrong.”
The “excellent student” according to the headmaster of her high school in Nyborg is campaigning for her family to be allowed to stay.
The young Syrian girl was recently told that her residence permit, which expired at the end of January, would not be renewed.
Like her, 189 Syrians have already had their residence permits revoked since the summer of 2020 after Copenhagen decided to re-examine the cases of around 500 Syrians from Damascus, under the control of Bashar Assad’s regime.
The revocations were on the grounds that “the current situation in Damascus is no longer such as to justify a residence permit or the extension of a residence permit.”
Some of the rejected applicants, who had originally been granted only a temporary permit, have been placed in a detention center.
“Being in a return center, you can’t work nor study and you get food three times a day. Basically they keep you there until you sign a paper saying that you’ll return voluntarily to Syria,” Hansen told AFP.
Under Danish immigration law, temporary residence permits are issued without an end date in cases of a “particularly serious situation in the country of origin characterised by arbitrary violence and attacks against civilians,” but can be revoked once conditions are deemed to have improved.
Some 35,500 Syrians currently live in Denmark, more than half of whom arrived in 2015, according to Statistics Denmark
Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it was concerned about Denmark’s decision, even with deportations currently suspended because of a lack of collaboration between Denmark and the Syrian regime after years of civil war.
UNHCR said it “does not consider that the recent improvements in security in parts of Syria to be sufficiently fundamental, stable or durable to justify ending international protection for any group of refugees.”
Rights group Amnesty International has also denounced the “worrisome development.”
“Denmark keeps sending signals that they don’t want any asylum seekers in the country and scaring the ones who are here into returning to their home countries even when they are not safe,” Lisa Blinkenberg, a senior adviser for Amnesty in Denmark, told AFP.
“Not only is Denmark the worst place in Europe but the country also shows a lack of solidarity with other European countries refusing to take a share in the burden,” Hansen said.
But, despite criticism even from within parliament, the government is sticking to its guns.
“The government’s policy is working, and I won’t back down, it won’t happen,” Social Democratic migration minister Mattias Tesfaye said after Aya Abu-Daher’s plea was broadcast.
“Denmark has been open and honest from day one. We have made it clear to the Syrian refugees that their residence permit is temporary and that the permit can be revoked if the need for protection ceases to exist,” Tesfaye told AFP on Friday.
The Nordic country has a stated goal of “zero asylum seekers,” and also offers special grants for voluntary returnees grants, which were accepted by 137 Syrians in 2020.

Entesar Al-Hammadi, the Yemeni model kidnapped by the Houthis

 AL-MUKALLA: The Iran-backed Houthi militia has kidnapped Entesar Al-Hammadi, a popular Yemeni model and actress, along with two other fashionistas in the capital Sanaa, residents and local media said. 

The abduction is the latest in a string of attacks by the rebels on dissidents and liberal women in areas under Houthi control. The incident led to an angry response at home and abroad, as human rights groups and activists called for Al-Hammadi’s release.

Al-Hammadi was born to a Yemeni father and an Ethiopian mother, and pursued her ambition to become a supermodel despite growing up in a conservative country. When she was a child, Al-Hammadi wore her mother’s clothes around the house and imitated famous models she watched on TV, saying that her parents “told me my dream of becoming a model was pie in the sky. I said that it was my dream and I would keep pursuing it,” she told Balqees TV in an interview last year.

Living in Sanaa, Al-Hammadi, who planned to enroll at a college next year, found fame when a friend, who was a professional photographer, published photos of her on social media wearing traditional Yemeni outfits, all with her in a hijab. The acclaim the images received prompted her to pose for images without a hijab, drawing criticism from conservative observers.

“I did not care about anything, since I love this profession,” she told the interviewer when asked about the criticism.

Since then she has continued to model, and also featured in two drama series on local TV. Al-Hammadi has also spoken out about her experience of racism on account of her dark skin, but has voiced her ambition to further her career, and model on international catwalks. “It would great if I was given an opportunity outside Yemen,” she said.

Iran Calls Natanz Atomic Site Blackout 'Nuclear Terrorism'

 Iran on Monday accused Israel of orchestrating an attack on its main nuclear facility that destroyed a number of centrifuges and caused an electricity blackout, at a time when Washington and Tehran are seeking to resume talks over a deal that constrains the Islamic Republic’s potential to produce a nuclear weapon.

Iran said Sunday that its Natanz nuclear facility had been attacked but didn’t provide details of the damage. On Monday, the head of Iran’s nuclear agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, said that parts of the enrichment facility were operating on emergency electricity. He also said all damaged centrifuges were IR-1s, the first generation of Iranian centrifuges and a workhorse of Tehran’s enrichment program.

Yemenis on terrorism watch list caught crossing US border illegally, CBP says