(NEW YORK) — The United States has been facing a COVID-19 surge as the more contagious delta variant continues to spread.
More than 682,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 4.7 million people have died from the disease worldwide, according to real-time data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The average number of daily deaths in the U.S. has risen about 20% in the last week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The U.S. is continuing to sink on the list of global vaccination rates, currently ranking No. 45, according to data compiled by The Financial Times. Just 64.3% of Americans ages 12 and up are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to data from the CDC.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
Sep 24, 6:23 am
CDC endorses Pfizer boosters for older and high-risk Americans
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has endorsed an independent advisory panel’s recommendation for seniors and other medically vulnerable Americans to get a booster shot of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, six months after their second dose.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, also partially overruled her agency’s advisory panel in a notable departure by adding a recommendation for a third dose for people who are considered high risk due to where they work, such as nurses and teachers — a group which the panel rejected in its recommendation. Some panelists said that without further data, they weren’t comfortable with automatically including younger people because of their jobs.
In a statement announcing her decision late Thursday, Walensky pointed to the benefit versus risk analysis she had weighed, and data rapidly evolving.
“In a pandemic, even with uncertainty, we must take actions that we anticipate will do the greatest good,” Walensky said. “While today’s action was an initial step related to booster shots, it will not distract from our most important focus of primary vaccination in the United States and around the world.”
With Walensky’s final sign-off, booster shots will now quickly become available for millions more Americans at pharmacies, doctors’ offices and other sites that offer the Pfizer vaccine as soon as Friday.
Sep 23, 8:40 pm
Leaving nurses out of booster recommendation ‘unconscionable,’ union charges
The nation’s largest union of registered nurses pushed back against the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel’s vote on COVID-19 booster shots, calling not including front-line workers like nurses in its recommendations “unconscionable.”
National Nurses United is urging CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to bypass what the advisory panel, ACIP, recommended and add nurses and other health care workers to the list of eligible booster recipients.
“Nurses and other health care workers were among the first to be vaccinated because of their high risk of exposure to the virus,” Deborah Burger, the union’s president, said in a statement. “Why leave them out of booster shots?”
“It is unconscionable that ACIP would not vote to keep us safer from death, severe Covid, and long Covid,” Burger continued. “We must do everything possible to ensure that the health of our nurses and other health care workers will not be put even more at risk.”
ACIP voted Thursday to recommend a third Pfizer dose for people aged 65 and older, as well as those as young as 18 if they have an underlying medical condition.
In its authorization Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration did agree to make the shots available to front-line workers. But ACIP said there was not yet enough data to support providing booster shots automatically to young people because of their jobs.
(NEW YORK) — One week after getting her first COVID-19 vaccine shot, Bernadette Ann Bowen said she started her period one day early.
Then, Bowen, a 31-year-old Ph.D. student at Bowling Green State University, said she experienced some of the worst menstrual cramps of her life.
“I started getting a headache and then started feeling cramps coming on,” Bowen told Good Morning America. “My nausea and abdominal pain became so severe at the peak of my cramps that I could barely stomach a few sips of water, as I laid there feeling like I was going to pass out from it all.”
After Bowen saw people on TikTok discussing similar changes in their menstrual cycles after being vaccinated, she said she was “stricken with fear” over what could happen when she received her second dose of the vaccine.
“A lot of people I saw said their experience was after the second shot, so I was literally stricken with fear for a whole month wondering what would happen,” she said. “I was so afraid that it would continue.”
Bowen though, like most women who have reported menstrual changes after the vaccine, experienced only the one-time change to her period.
Nonetheless, she described it as “unacceptable” that people who menstruate did not know ahead of time that the vaccine may cause changes to the timing or severity of their menstrual cycles, even if temporary.
“Not getting a single warning is unacceptable,” she said. “It would be one thing if we were given a single consideration, but just knowing the design of medicine is so biased that this wouldn’t have been reported as a warning, it’s telling.”
Now, nearly one year after the COVID-19 vaccines began to be distributed in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has committed $1.6 million in funding to “explore potential links between COVID-19 vaccination and menstrual changes,” according a news release.
The funding, announced last month, comes as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer booster shots Wednesday for high-risk Americans and adults over age 65. FDA’s acting commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said the list of high-risk Americans should include health care workers, teachers and grocery story workers, all industries with largely female workforces.
The research funding also comes months after people began to share on social media their experiences of short-term period side effects after being vaccinated.
Tens of thousands of people documented their side effects in an online database created by researchers Katharine Lee, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Kathryn Clancy, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who each said they experienced unexpected menstrual cycles after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, and began to collect data.
The newly announced NIH funding, for which Lee and Clancy applied but were not selected, will go to researchers at five institutions: Boston University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University and Oregon Health and Science University.
The researchers will study everything from menstrual cycle changes reported on period tracking apps like Clue to menstrual changes in people with endometriosis and people trying to get pregnant, people who have not been vaccinated and teenagers. They will be examining how the vaccines may have affected flow, cycle length and pain, as well as exploring why COVID-19 vaccines may cause changes, according to Candace Tingen, Ph.D., program director of the Gynecologic Health and Disease Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
“Exactly like you’d see on a medication, that it may cause drowsiness, we want to say to women, ‘If you get a booster, if you get a vaccine, you might have a slightly heavier period for a cycle or two,'” Tingen said. “That’s what we want when we go in to get vaccinated, so we know how to prepare.”
Data on menstrual side effects was not widely collected during clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines, which were conducted by the companies behind the vaccines, Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, according to Tingen.
She said the NIH was motivated to fund research both from reports of menstrual side effects as well as the misinformation that followed around menstrual changes and fertility.
“There was a lot of misinformation out there, and NIH sees its mandate as countering misinformation with accurate information,” Tingen said. “[Research] is something that we could do to step in and provide some real information about whether or not this is this is accurate.”
Experts in the medical community agree menstrual changes potentially linked to COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be temporary, and current evidence suggests that the vaccine has no impact on current or future fertility.
A possible explanation for temporary changes to period timing, flow and pain may have to do with how the body responds to physical and emotional stresses. Prior studies indicate that COVID-19 itself can be a stressor, leading to irregular menstrual cycles for some people.
Menstrual changes are also controlled by the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland in the brain, along with the ovaries, which use hormones as signals. These hormone signals can be disrupted when the body goes through changes that occur with an infection, and even a vaccine.
The research funded by NIH to help solidify these theories will include as many as 500,000 participants, some of whom are already involved in clinical studies, according to Tingen. She said because of the studies’ reach, transgender and nonbinary people will be included.
Dr. Laura Payne, director of the Clinical and Translational Pain Research Lab at McLean Hospital and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is one of the five researchers receiving NIH funding.
She is studying teens ages 14 to 19 to explore why the COVID-19 vaccines may cause changes in periods.
Specifically, Payne is looking at whether the vaccines cause inflammatory markers to be released, which then affect estrogen, which then affects menstrual cycles.
“Right now, the data on this particular mechanism is pretty limited to animal studies so we don’t really know how inflammation affects estrogen,” Payne said. “I think if we can show that inflammation has an effect on the menstrual cycle, that can help us just better understand the different things that affect the menstrual cycle.”
“In the bigger scheme of things, we’re just putting the menstrual cycle and menstrual health to the forefront as an important part of medical research, and it just hasn’t been,” she said. “It’s certainly an additional variable, but it’s really important and it’s important for women even if it’s not causing any kind of dangerous condition, it’s an important measure of health for women.”
Payne called it a “miss” that changes to menstrual cycles were not looked at during the vaccine trials, but said she is hopeful that the work being done now will help prioritize menstrual research in the future.
“In the vaccine trials, what I’m guessing is that they were just looking for indicators of pretty severe health complications that would land somebody in the hospital and they didn’t feel like changes in the menstrual cycle were part of that,” she said. “There’s certainly an argument to be made for that, but I think with the anecdotal reports and with the research that myself and the other [principal investigators] will be doing, hopefully this will inform future trials to say maybe this isn’t a life-or-death situation, but it’s important to women and it’s important to include.”
In addition to speaking out like so many people did when it came to menstrual changes with the vaccines, Payne said people can also volunteer for clinical research in order to move research on menstruation forward.
“Volunteering for clinical research is one of the best things that you can do to support the type of research that you want to see,” she said. “One of the biggest obstacles that we face in clinical research is finding ways to access participants, particularly participants from diverse backgrounds, and that’s something that we really are focusing on and NIH is really committed so we get an understanding from diverse samples of people.”
(NEW YORK) — A new study found that children whose mothers experienced depression during and soon after pregnancy are more likely to experience depression themselves.
While experts said more research is needed on the subject, they emphasized that this new finding reinforces the urgent need to identify and treat depression among pregnant women — not just for their sake, but potentially for the sake of their child as well.
“It’s definitely been proven that there’s genetic linkage for psychiatric disorders,” Dr. Gabrielle Shapiro, a child psychiatrist from the American Psychiatric Association, told ABC News. “And identifying [depression] in early childhood would be the best way to have an impact on … lifetime trajectory functioning” for children with mental illness.
In the study, researchers in the U.K. reviewed survey data from a large database of women who gave birth during the early 1990s. They focused on a subset of over 5,000 mothers and assessed their reported symptoms of depression, both during pregnancy and after they gave birth.
The children were also surveyed throughout childhood and young adulthood. Researchers found that children of depressed mothers not only had more symptoms of depression themselves but also that the symptoms escalated faster in them than they did in children without exposure to maternal depression.
“We found that the depression scores of offspring of mothers … increased at a greater rate over time — in other words, their scores went up by more points each year than offspring of non-depressed mothers,” Dr. Rebecca Pearson, co-author of the study, told ABC News.
The data also revealed a potential association between a father’s depression and childhood depression, though the study was not constructed to assess that relationship fully.
Although previous research has looked at the link between parental depression and childhood mental health, this study is the first to indicate that the timing of when a parent has depressive symptoms may contribute to a child’s mental health in a unique way.
In a press release, Dr. Joanne Black, chair of the Faculty of Perinatal Psychiatry at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the study “shows that the timing of depression in parents (during pregnancy, after childbirth or both) and if the mother, father or both were affected, are all important risk factors for the child’s future mental health.”
Exactly why this timing appears to be important is still unknown, but may point to the importance of screening for depression during the peripartum period and supporting mothers with mental health conditions. It also begs the question: Are genetic factors that lead to depression passed from mother to child in the womb?
Although the findings are intriguing, it remains unclear if the results are applicable to the population at large, as this study was conducted in a part of the U.K. with little socioeconomic or racial diversity.
This matters to Shapiro, who stressed the importance of recognizing racial disparities in childhood mental health.
“It’s even more important to screen our [Black, indigenous, people of color] population and make it more acceptable for them to have early intervention and be OK with treatment discussions,” she said.
Moving forward, the study’s findings may help health care providers identify and treat children through supporting families with mental health needs.
(WASHINGTON) — The House on Friday passed a bill to uphold abortion rights for women, taking swift action in response to a new Texas law that bans nearly all abortions in the state.
The final tally was 218-211 with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing the vote.
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The House bill has little chance of becoming law and is largely symbolic given Republican opposition in the Senate.
The House bill would codify protections provided by the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized women’s right to an abortion.
The Texas law that passed in September prohibits abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy and allows “any person, other than an officer or employee of state or local government,” to bring a civil suit against someone believed to have “aided or abetted” an unlawful abortion.
People who successfully sue an abortion provider under this law could be awarded at least $10,000.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the so-called “heartbeat ban” on May 19 and it went into effect on Sept. 1.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 on Sept. 1 to allow SB8 to take effect on procedural grounds, despite what the majority acknowledged as “serious questions” about constitutionality. The justices did not address those questions.
Pelosi has said taking congressional action would make a “tremendous difference” in Democrats’ efforts to maintain access to abortion rights. She called the Supreme Court’s decision “shameful.”
Ahead of Friday’s vote, Pelosi said the House legislation should “send a very positive message to the women of our country — but not just the women, to the women and their families, to everyone who values freedom, honors our Constitution and respects women.”
Since Texas’s abortion ban went into effect, lawmakers in 11 states, including Florida, have announced intentions or plans to model legislation after the state’s law, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.
The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in a Mississippi abortion case in early December. The high court is expected to consider the legality of Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that is intended to challenge Roe v. Wade.
(ATLANTA) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has endorsed an independent advisory panel’s recommendation for seniors and other medically vulnerable Americans to get a booster shot of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, six months after their second dose.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, also partially overruled her agency’s advisory panel in a notable departure by adding a recommendation for a third dose for people who are considered high risk due to where they work, such as nurses and teachers — a group which the panel rejected in its recommendation. Some panelists said that without further data, they weren’t comfortable with automatically including younger people because of their jobs.
In a statement announcing her decision late Thursday, Walensky pointed to the benefit versus risk analysis she had weighed, and data rapidly evolving.
“In a pandemic, even with uncertainty, we must take actions that we anticipate will do the greatest good,” Walensky said. “While today’s action was an initial step related to booster shots, it will not distract from our most important focus of primary vaccination in the United States and around the world.”
With Walensky’s final sign-off, booster shots will now quickly become available for millions more Americans at pharmacies, doctors’ offices and other sites that offer the Pfizer vaccine as soon as Friday.
The CDC’s independent advisory panel voted unanimously on Thursday to recommend Pfizer boosters for people aged 65 and older, along with long-term care facility residents and people as young as 18, if they have an underlying medical condition.
People younger than 49, however, should only get that third dose if the benefits outweigh the risks, the panel said — a personal consideration to discuss with their doctor.
Walensky’s endorsement at least in part buttons up what has become a seething scientific debate after the Biden administration announced “boosters-for-all” ahead of any reviews from the regulatory bodies, or their independent groups. While the White House’s political appointees had endorsed Biden’s timeline, some of their career scientists and advisers vehemently objected to the incomplete data they were being asked to assess.
Ahead of Thursday’s vote, Walensky addressed the panelists and thanked them for “leaning in” to the complex issue at hand and “trying to put the pieces together.”
“You’re tasked with difficult decisions, weighing the risks and benefits extrapolating from sometimes a wealth and sometimes a paucity of data available,” Walensky said, but reminded them that despite the complex and contentious debate they share the goal of pulling the nation out of the pandemic.
“We all recognize that the science and data of COVID-19 are moving faster than any data we’ve ever seen before. And while I recognize a tremendously heavy lift of the past year, we all know that the pace is unlikely to let up anytime soon,” she added. “We will continue this dialogue, you will have more data to review and more recommendations to make and I will be here with you.”
Not every panelist was excited about the idea of boosters, insisting the vaccines still provide remarkable protection and that it was unvaccinated Americans who remained most at risk.
“I feel like we’re putting lipstick on hogs. This is not going to solve the pandemic,” said Dr. Keipp Talbot, a voting panel member and infectious diseases professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
The panel’s vote narrowed Wednesday’s authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, which did agree to make the shots available to frontline workers.
The vote also followed weeks of a contentious back and forth among top health experts over who should get a booster dose and when — and whether it’s still premature to be asking the question.
Scientists agreed that while vaccine protection is waning slightly, on the whole, vaccines are still working to dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalization. And many feared endorsing booster doses for most would imply vaccines are no longer working.
“I feel that we’re getting too much ahead of ourselves and that we have too much hope on the line with these boosters,” said voting member Dr. James Loehr of Cayuga Family Medicine in Ithaca, New York. “Having said that, you shouldn’t let the perfect be in the way of the good.”
Panelists initially pushed back on the proposals that American adults, 18 to 64, who are at risk for severe COVID-19 infection due to underlying medical conditions, or due to their occupation and setting receive a Pfizer booster dose. Many members stressed that in order to truly “move the dial” on the pandemic, more people need to complete the initial vaccination series.
“I think two and three are fraught with peril,” said member Dr. Oliver Brooks, chief medical officer of Watts HealthCare Corporation in Los Angeles, California. “They’ll be superfluous and they’ll create great inequities and problems within the implementation, so I’m really concerned about the data for boosters in general.”
One repeated sticking point for the CDC’s panelists during deliberations on Thursday: the still-open question over whether boosting with mixed vaccines might be permitted — since for those who received the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, there is no third dose protection currently available.
The FDA’s vaccine chief, Dr. Peter Marks, addressed the CDC’s panelists ahead of Thursday’s vote and acknowledged their frustrations.
“I think we understand at FDA the relative urgency here of trying to have a solution for anyone who has been vaccinated with any of the authorized or approved vaccines,” Marks said. “Unfortunately, we’re not in a place right now which I can give you an exact timeline, but I can tell you that we will proceed with all due urgency to try to get there as rapidly as possible.”
(WASHINGTON) — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot issued its first subpoenas Thursday to four former senior Trump administration officials, including former President Donald Trump’s longest-serving aide and last chief of staff.
The committee is seeking documents and depositions from Dan Scavino — Trump’s caddy-turned-social media guru and senior White House aide — former chief of staff Mark Meadows, conservative activist Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, who was the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary on Jan. 6.
In the letters, the panel said it was seeking information about Trump’s actions before, during and after the Capitol riot regarding his campaign to overturn the election results.
The committee is demanding records be delivered by Oct. 7, and for all four witnesses to appear for closed-door depositions on Oct. 14 and 15.
“The Select Committee has reason to believe that you have information relevant to understanding the important activities that led to and informed the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote in letters to Bannon and Scavino.
The panel’s members have vowed to move aggressively to obtain documents and records from witnesses in Trump’s orbit, many of whom have a history of stonewalling congressional investigators.
“That is a concern, but we have additional tools that we didn’t before, including a Justice Department that may be willing to pursue criminal contempt when people deliberately flout the compulsory process,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told reporters Thursday about the possibility of Trump aides defying congressional investigators.
Trump, in a statement, pledged to fight the subpoenas “on executive privilege and other grounds,” though not every recipient was a White House or administration official.
Meadows, who was Trump’s last chief of staff, was close to Trump before, during and after Jan. 6, and was involved in efforts to challenge the election results — participating in Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger when he repeatedly urged him to reverse the presidential election results.
A Meadows aide declined to comment on the subpoena and whether Meadows would cooperate.
Patel, a former GOP congressional aide who worked in the Trump National Security Council before joining the Pentagon, was involved in security preparations for the Jan. 6 counting of the electoral vote on Capitol Hill and mobilizing the response to the riot, according to the committee, citing records obtained from the Defense Department.
Bannon, who remained an outside adviser to the president after helping to lead his first presidential campaign and a short stint in the White House, was at a meeting at the Willard Hotel where lawmakers were encouraged to challenge the election results, the committee claimed in its letter.
He was quoted as saying, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” the panel wrote in its letter, citing a Jan. 5 episode of his podcast, “War Room.”
Scavino, Trump’s longest-serving aide and one of his fiercest defenders on social media, was with Trump before and after rioters stormed the Capitol, the committee claimed in its letter, citing reporting from Peril, the new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
He also used his Twitter feed to promote the Jan. 6 demonstration in Washington in support of Trump. Some attendees of that event outside the White House later marched on the Capitol and stormed Congress as lawmakers attempted to officially affirm the election results.
(WASHINGTON) — The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new rule Thursday to reduce super-polluting greenhouse gases commonly used in air conditioners and refrigerators as part of the cooling process.
This is a major leap forward in the Biden administration’s plan to combat climate change despite the president’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which includes an overhaul on climate policy, facing broad opposition from Republicans in Congress.
These greenhouse gases, known as hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs, have an impact on warming the climate that is hundreds to thousands of times greater than the same amount of carbon dioxide, senior Biden administration officials said in a call with reporters Wednesday.
The rule creates a legal requirement for companies and manufacturers to reduce HFCs and was first proposed in May under the 2020 American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, or AIM. The AIM Act requires the EPA to phase down the production and consumption of HFCs, manage the gases and their substitutes as well as facilitate the transition to new greener technologies.
Included in the new rule is the creation of a climate protection program that will phase down the production and consumption of HFCs by 85% within the next 15 years.
It’s expected the phase down will reduce emissions by the equivalent of 4.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2050. According to the EPA officials, that’s equal to nearly three years of emissions from the U.S. power sector.
Reducing HFCs is part of the Biden administration’s efforts to reduce the effects of climate change while also generating jobs, a key sticking point of his climate policy initiatives.
“This actually reaffirms what President Biden always says when he thinks about climate, he thinks about jobs,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters Wednesday. “Because this administration knows what’s good for the environment is also good for the economy. Transitioning to safer alternatives and more energy-efficient cooling technologies is expected to generate more than $270 billion in cost savings and public health benefits by the year 2050.”
The EPA estimated that by the end of next year, the annual net savings of reducing HFC emissions will be $1.7 billion.
The rule also establishes an allowance and trading program to reduce HFCs. In accordance with the AIM Act, companies need an allowance to produce or import any HFCs or HFC-related products. The agency will have the allocation amounts distributed to each company by Oct. 1, according to Joseph Goffman, EPA acting assistant administrator.
According to the EPA, along with five other agencies, it will work to prevent the illegal importation and production of HFCs in the U.S. by creating an interagency task force.
In the 1990s, the value of seizures of refrigerants at the U.S.-Mexico border were second only to marijuana, according to the advocacy group Environmental Investigation Agency.
Stephen Yurek, the president and CEO of the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a policy group that represents the interests of manufacturers, said the institute has supported the rule since the beginning.
“It’s great for U.S. industry which are the innovators of the new products. It’s great for the economy for jobs and that, but it’s also great for the environment,” Yurek said. “It’s a win-win for everybody.”
Climate advocates welcome the rule as well and that the Biden administration is moving forward to fulfill the requirements of the AIM Act, but some said this is just a starting point.
“It’s now imperative to adopt additional rules that ensure a swift transition to new technologies and full lifecycle management of these gases,” Christina Starr, senior policy analyst at the Environmental Investigation Agency, said in a statement.
Danielle Wright, the executive director of the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council, which works to promote the transition to natural refrigeration agents such as ammonia, said there is no doubt that this rule is an important first step.
But the key about the rule is that it is a phase down, not a phase out, she said. It does not create a cost-effective pathway for companies to transition to the gases that have the lowest impact on the climate: natural refrigerants. Switching to these alternative gases for refrigeration and cooling would be the equivalent of switching to electric cars, according to Wright.
“In order to make that an economically viable decision, you need really strong policy,” Wright said. “And so this policy is not strong enough to create those economically viable market conditions. It’s still an environmental win, but we’re not going as far as we could,” she said.
By finalizing this rule, the U.S. will be in line with key components of the Montreal Protocol’s Kigali Amendment — an international agreement aimed at reducing the production of HFCs.
However, the U.S. has not ratified the Kigali Amendment to officially join the treaty, and the White House has yet to send the amendment to the Senate for ratification.
When asked by reporters when the president would send the amendment to the Senate, national climate adviser Gina McCarthy said she did not have a date for when that will happen.
Nonetheless, the EPA is calling this rule a historic step towards reducing the effects of climate change by implementing pollution regulations across multiple industries.
“This is a very proud moment for the EPA, and more importantly for the American people,” Regan said.
(OKLAHOMA) — Julius Jones, who has spent the past 20 years on death row, has never been closer to freedom, despite the fact that last week, his execution date was set for Nov. 18.
The Oklahoma Parole Board voted 3-1 to commute Jones’ sentence to life in prison with the possibility of parole, and now, the final decision on his fate remains in the hands of Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt.
Jones’ mother, Madeline Davis-Jones, told “Nightline” the news is “magical.”
“I’m still in shock, because it’s not over, you know? We still have so much ground [to] cover,” Jones’ sister, Antoinette Jones, said. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but it was a good feeling.”
Antoinette Jones said her brother was calm when he heard the parole board’s recommendation, as he knows work still has to be done to secure his freedom.
“He said, ‘I’m good. I’ll be even better when I get out and I can hug y’all and we can start helping change the world,'” Antoinette Jones said. “It was a relief. I could breathe a little bit easier.”
Jones’ sister remains hopeful that he will be freed, and said she can picture justice for her brother.
“Julius being able to feel the sun on his skin, the natural sun on his skin. It looks like him having no chains [on] when he gets to go outside,” she said. “It looks like freedom.”
Julius Jones was 19 years old when he was arrested for the 1999 murder of Oklahoma businessman Paul Howell, and sentenced to death in 2002. What followed were decades of public scrutiny and relentless work from his legal team.
“We think Julius was wrongfully convicted and that Oklahoma is at risk of executing an innocent man,” Jones’ attorney, Amanda Bass, said.
Now 41 years old, Jones has spent most of his life behind bars. Even after so many years, his sister and mother have yet to give up hope.
Before he was in prison, friends and teachers knew Jones as a champion high school basketball player who attended the University of Oklahoma on an academic scholarship.
That all changed in 1999 when Howell, 45, was shot in his family’s driveway after a car-jacking in the wealthy suburb of Edmond, Oklahoma.
Howell’s GMC Suburban went missing and his sister, Megan Tobey, was the only eye-witness.
“Megan Tobey described the shooter as a young black man wearing a red bandana, a white shirt, and a stocking cap or skullcap. She was not able to identify the shooter’s face because it was covered,” Bass told ABC News in 2018.
Two days after Howell was killed, police found his Suburban parked in a grocery store parking lot. They learned later that a man named Ladell King had been offering to sell the car.
King named Chris Jordan and Julius Jones to investigators and said the two men had asked him to help them sell the stolen Suburban.
“Ladell was interviewed by the lead detectives in this case. He told the police that on the night of the crime, a guy named Chris Jordan comes to his apartment. A few minutes later, according to Ladell King, Julius Jones drives up,” attorney Dale Baich told ABC News in 2018.
King accused Jordan of being the driver and claimed that he and Jones were looking for Suburbans to steal, but it was Jones who shot Howell.
“Both Ladell King and Christopher Jordan were directing police’s attention to the home of Julius Jones’ parents as a place that would have incriminating items of evidence,” Bass said.
Investigators found a gun wrapped in a red bandana in the crawl space of Jones’ family home. The next day, Jones was arrested for capital murder.
Jones’ attorneys say the evidence police found could have been planned by Jordan. They say Jordan had stayed at Jones’ house the night after the murder, but Jordan denied those claims during the trial.
In the years since, Jones’ defense team has argued that racial bias and missteps from his then public-defense team played a role.
Jones’ team has submitted files to the parole board that they said proved his innocence, including affidavits and taped video interviews with inmates who had served time in prison with Jordan. They said they allegedly heard Jordan confess to Howell’s murder.
In a statement to ABC News, Jordan’s attorney, Billy Bock, said that “Chris Jordan maintains his position that his role in the death of Paul Howell was as an accomplice to Julius Jones. Mr. Jordan testified truthfully in the jury trial of Mr. Jones and denies ‘confessing’ to anyone.”
Jordan served 15 years in prison before he was released.
In 2020, Jones’ story was thrown back into the spotlight when unlikely legal ally Kim Kardashian drew public attention to his case. Kardashian, who is studying to take California’s bar exam, has been vocal on the issue of the death penalty and prison reform and has campaigned to free a number of men and women who were incarcerated.
“Kim Kardashian, I felt like maybe one of my sorority sisters … she was down to earth,” Davis-Jones said.
Antoinette Jones said Kardashian put in the effort to help her brother.
“She sat down and she broke down my brother’s case. That means that she actually did the work,” Jones said. “She did the work to go back and check certain things, to point out certain things.”
“The fact that she told me that she was able to go see my brother, it was almost like she took a piece of him and brought it to us and then we could feel like he was there with us,” Jones added.
But despite all the efforts, Julius Jones’ execution date is still in place.
His family said they have to just wait to see if Stitt will agree with the parole board’s recommendation and commute Jones’ November death sentence. Three members of the Pardon and Parole board were appointed by the governor, a fact that gives Davis-Jones some hope.
“I’d like for [Stitt] to do the right thing, because the truth will set you free,” Davis-Jones said. “But most of all, being in leadership, I know sometimes it’s hard … to make decisions, [but] you have to try to make the right decisions.”
(NEW YORK) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory panel has unanimously voted to recommend booster doses of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for people aged 65 and older, along with long-term care facility residents, at least six months after their second dose.
The panel also voted to recommend booster doses for people between the ages of 50 and 64 years old who have underlying medical conditions, at least six months out from their second dose.
This recommendation roughly follows — but is slightly more specific — than authorization Wednesday night from the Food and Drug Administration, greenlighting the third shot for anyone 65 or older, as well as for people as young as 18, if they have a medical condition that puts them at risk of severe COVID-19 or if they work a frontline job that makes it more likely that they would get infected.
The vote also follows weeks of contentious back and forth amongst top health experts over who should get a booster dose and when — and whether it’s still premature to be asking the question. However, advisory panelists ultimately voted to recommend the booster shot, informed by data showing the gradually waning immunity from the vaccine impacting the elderly and high risk groups.
(NEW YORK) — The national spotlight on Gabby Petito’s disappearance has given families of other missing persons hope that they too can amplify their stories and find loves ones.
Petito made headlines after she went missing on a cross-country road trip with her boyfriend earlier this month. A body found over the weekend near Grand Teton National Park was confirmed to be hers on Tuesday. The coroner said she died by homicide, but the cause of death is pending final autopsy results.
Petito is just one of thousands reported missing each year — the FBI had over 89,000 active missing persons at the end of 2020.
The Petito case also has become a point of heartbreak for other families, including the sister of Maya Millete, a California mother missing since January.
“I know the circumstances of Gabby’s case are different but it just brought back a lot of pain,” Maricris Droualillet told ABC San Diego affiliate KGTV.
Michael Alcazar, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York Police Department detective, told ABC News the Petito case became a national frenzy because she seemed familiar to them.
“I think people see her as someone in their family, perhaps their child or they might see themselves as Gabby, a girlfriend or daughter,” Alcazar said. “I think it’s like a ‘damsel in distress’ syndrome. That’s just the culture in America — we want to protect the females.”
Her case, Alcazar added, showed the “value of social media posts and how it propelled this case nationally,” and how other people may jump on the trend to “put pressure on law enforcement to utilize their manpower to solve these cases that have been going on for months.”
The pressure could prompt police to reprioritize cases or recruit more help, as in Petito’s case, which got FBI assistance.
He pointed to the cracking of the case of a 4-year-old girl who was murdered in 1991. Dubbed Baby Hope for 22 years, she finally was identified as Anjelica Castillo. The case went cold but was reopened in 2013, finally solved through a tip.
“On his 20th anniversary, our Chief Joseph Reznick put up more posters regarding the Baby Hope case,” Alcazar explained. “I think we might have posted it in our Crime Stoppers kit. That’s how we finally were able to identify Baby Hope — somebody 20 years later called in a tip. That was through social media.”
Here’s a snapshot of families pushing forward with their own missing cases, hoping to find a break:
Jelani Day
In Illinois, a search was launched for Jelani Day, a 25-year-old graduate student at Illinois State University last seen on Aug. 24, according to the Bloomington Police Department. A body found near the Illinois River was identified as Day on Thursday after this story was initially published, Bloomington Police announced.
“Currently the cause of death is unknown, pending further investigation, and toxicology testing,” the police said in a statement.
He was reported missing Aug. 25 by his family and an ISU faculty member. He had not shown up to class the past several days before he disappeared, police said in a statement.
A missing persons post seeks Julian Day, a Illinois State University grad student.
Day was captured on surveillance footage entering a retail store called “Beyond/Hello” in Bloomington around 9 a.m. on Aug. 24, wearing a blue Detroit Lions baseball hat, a black T-shirt with a Jimi Hendrix graphic, white and silver shorts, and black shoes with white soles.
Police found his vehicle, a white 2010 Chrysler 300, two days later in a wooded area concealed by trees. Inside, cops found the clothing he was seen wearing in the video footage but no other sign of him.
Bloomington Police said in a Sept. 5 statement that a search team found an unidentified body off the south bank of the Illinois River. The LaSalle County Coroner’s Office initially said the identification process could take a few weeks.
Day’s heartbroken mother, Carmen Bolden Day, pleaded for him to be found.
“I shouldn’t have to beg, I shouldn’t have to plead, I shouldn’t have to feel that there is a racial disparity … I want these people that have their resources to realize this could happen to them,” she said on “Good Morning America.”
Anyone with information about Jelani Day is asked to contact BPD Detective Paul Jones at 309-434-2548 or at Pjones@cityblm.org
Daniel Robinson
A 24-year-old geologist, Daniel Robinson, went missing outside Buckeye, Arizona, three months ago. The Buckeye Police Department said in an update last week that the search is ongoing.
Robinson was last seen June 23 after leaving a job site near Sun Valley Parkway and Cactus Road, and he didn’t tell anyone where he was going, police said.
His jeep was found turned over in a ravine on July 19, 4 miles from where he was last seen, officials said. The airbags in the car had deployed and initial evidence indicated Daniel was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident. Officials found clothes, his cell phone, wallet and keys.
A missing persons post seeks Daniel Robinson, a 24-year-old geologist who disappeared near Buckeye, AZ on June 23.
Later in July, a human skull was found south of where the Jeep was recovered, but it was determined that it didn’t belong to Daniel, police said. No other remains were found.
Investigators have used ATVs, cadaver dogs and a drone and a helicopter to search for Robinson. His family has organized their own searches in the scorching desert.
Robinson’s father, David Robinson, traveled 2,000 miles from South Carolina to Arizona to help search for his son.
“I’m not leaving,” he told ABC Phoenix affiliate KNX. “I’m not leaving until I find my son.”
Anyone with information that can help solve this case is urged to call the Buckeye Police Department non-emergency number at 623-349-6400.
Lauren Cho
Lauren Cho, a 30-year-old from New Jersey also known as “El”, was last seen leaving a residence around 5 p.m. on June 28 in Yucca Valley in California, police said in a statement. She hasn’t been seen or heard from since then.
She had moved to California from New Jersey eight months earlier.
A missing persons poster seeks Lauren Cho who went missing June 28 in Yucca Valley, Calif.
On Tuesday, the Morongo Basic Sheriff’s Station announced that investigators from the Specialized Investigations Division, experts in homicides and suspicious deaths, are assisting in the search effort, investigating leads and working with Cho’s family and friends.
Detectives with the Morongo Basin Station have executed a search warrant in the 8600 block of Benmar Trail, where she was last seen reportedly walking away from the residence, and conducted aerial searches of a remote mountain terrain nearby.
Anyone with information regarding the search for Ms. Cho is urged to contact Detective Edward Hernandez or Sergeant Justin Giles, Specialized Investigations Division, at (909) 387-3589. You may remain anonymous by contacting the We-Tip hotline at 800-78-CRIME (27463) or www.wetip.com.
Maya Millete
Meanwhile in California, family members of Maya Millete, a married Chula Vista mother of three, are still searching for her after more than eight months after she was last seen.
Millete, 39, disappeared on Jan. 7 without a trace.
Droualillet, Millete’s sister, said the attention of the Petito case has become a painful reminder of Maya’s unknown whereabouts.
“I know Chula Vista police are working very hard, but the urgency we see in this case is heartbreaking,” Droualillet told KGTV.
A missing persons poster seeks Maya Millete, a mother-of-three who disappeared from Chula Vista California in January.
The Chula Vista Police Department is working with the San Diego County District Attorney’s office, the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
On July 22, Larry Millete, Maya’s husband, was named a person of interest in the case.
The Chula Vista Police Department said its interviewed 79 individuals and written 64 search warrants for residences, vehicles, cell and electric devices, and social media data in the case in a statement published Sept. 9.
Anyone who may have any information regarding May’s disappearance is asked to please contact San Diego County Crime Stoppers at 888-580-8477 or the CVPD at 619-691-5151.
