A 5-year-old receiving a Pfizer-BioNTech trial dose last month.Credit...Shawn Rocco/Duke University, via Reuters
“WASHINGTON — Federal regulators evaluated for the first time on Friday the safety and efficacy of a coronavirus vaccine for children 5 to 11, saying that the benefits of staving off Covid-19 with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine generally outweighed the risks of the most worrisome possible side effects in that age group.
The analysis came on the same day that the Food and Drug Administration posted data from Pfizer showing that the vaccine had a 90.7 percent efficacy rate in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 in a clinical trial of 5- to 11-year-olds.
The findings could add momentum for F.D.A. authorization of the pediatric dose on an emergency basis, perhaps as early as next week, opening up a long-awaited new phase of the nation’s vaccination campaign. The agency’s independent vaccine expert committee is set to vote Tuesday on whether to recommend authorization.
In a briefing document posted on the F.D.A. website, the agency said it had balanced the dangers of hospitalization, death or other serious consequences from Covid-19 against the risk of myocarditis. A rare condition involving inflammation of the heart muscle, myocarditis has been linked to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, especially among young men.” Read more at New York Times
“The Supreme Court agreed to quickly consider two lawsuits challenging a Texas ban on most abortions. It left the state law in place for now, but said it would hear oral arguments on Nov. 1.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The Border Patrol made about 1.66 million arrests at the southern border in the 2021 fiscal year. It was the highest annual number ever recorded. The pace of migrants coming has emerged as one of the most difficult issues for the Biden administration.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“WASHINGTON — President Biden and Congress’ top two Democrats labored to wrap up their giant domestic legislation Friday as the party continued scaling back the measure and determining ways to pay for it ahead of new deadlines.
Biden had breakfast at the White House with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer joined in a call from New York. The leaders have been working with party moderates and progressives to shrink the once-$3.5 trillion, 10-year package of social services and climate change strategies to around $2 trillion, pushing for an agreement.
Pelosi said a deal was ‘very possible.’” Read more at Boston Globe
“WASHINGTON — The White House said Friday that President Biden would speak in the coming weeks about moving to ‘fundamentally alter’ the filibuster or even eliminate the legislative roadblock that empowers the Senate minority as he aims to pass sweeping voting laws and secure the nation’s credit.
Press secretary Jen Psaki said Americans should ‘stay tuned a’bout what changes Biden would embrace, as he appears to be warming to changing the Senate rule. Biden has previously stated he was supportive of requiring that lawmakers physically hold the Senate floor to sustain a filibuster, but on Thursday suggested he could support eliminating it entirely for some issues.” Read more at Boston Globe
“WASHINGTON — After losing the centerpiece of his climate agenda just a week before heading to a major global warming summit, President Biden intends to make the case that the United States has a new plan that will still meet its ambitions to sharply cut greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.
The administration’s strategy now consists of a three-pronged approach of generous tax incentives for wind, solar and other clean energy, tough regulations to restrict pollution coming from power plants and automobile tailpipes, and a slew of clean energy laws enacted by states.
An analysis released this week by Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan analysis firm, found that strategy could technically fulfill Mr. Biden’s ambitious pledge to cut the country’s emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The United States is historically the largest source of the pollution that is heating the planet.” Read more at New York Times
“WASHINGTON — Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona and one of her party’s only holdouts on President Biden’s sprawling budget bill, has cultivated a profile in Congress as a business-minded centrist.
But her refusal to raise tax rates on high earners and major corporations to pay for Mr. Biden’s plan is pushing Democrats toward wealth taxation and other measures once embraced only by the party’s left flank.
The frenzied search for new paths around Ms. Sinema’s tax-rate blockade has cheered liberals but raised serious qualms among more moderate Democrats, who now openly say they hope that Ms. Sinema’s business allies will pressure her to relent once they — and she — see the details of the alternatives that she is forcing on her colleagues to pay for about $2 trillion in spending on social programs and anti-climate-change initiatives.” Read more at New York Times
Houston’s Luis García leaves the game as fans cheer in the sixth inning of Friday’s game. Photograph: Ken Murray/EPA
“Rookie Luis García showed the poise of an October ace, Yordan Alvarez stayed hot at the plate and the Houston Astros earned yet another trip to the World Series, beating the Boston Red Sox 5-0 Friday night in Game 6 of the AL Championship Series.
The Astros advanced to the World Series for the fourth time overall and the second time in three seasons. They won the championship in 2017, a crown tainted by the team’s sign-stealing scandal, before losing to the Washington Nationals in seven games in 2019.
Manager Dusty Baker’s team will open the World Series on Tuesday night, either at Dodger Stadium or home against Atlanta. The Braves lead Los Angeles 3-2 in the NL Championship Series going into Game 6 on Saturday night.” Read more at The Guardian
“Alec Baldwin was handed a loaded weapon by an assistant director who indicated it was safe to use in the moments before the actor fatally shot a cinematographer, court records released on Friday show.
The assistant director did not know the prop gun was loaded with live rounds, according to a search warrant filed in a Santa Fe court.
The cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was shot in the chest. The director, Joel Souza, who was standing behind her, was wounded, the records show.
The warrant was obtained on Friday so that investigators could document the scene at the ranch where the shooting took place. It notes that Baldwin’s blood-stained costume for the western film Rust was taken as evidence, as was the weapon that was fired.” Read more at The Guardian
“NEW YORK — Lev Parnas, a Florida businessman who is an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani's, was found guilty on Friday of using funds from a foreign investor to try to influence political candidates through campaign donations.
It took the federal jury in U.S. District Court in Manhattan less than a day to find that Parnas committed fraud through donations to several state and federal candidates that were bankrolled by a Russian financier. Parnas was also found guilty on counts related to a $325,000 donation in 2018 to a joint fundraising committee that supported then-President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors told the jury that the illegal fundraising efforts documented in text messages and other trial evidence gave Parnas access to elected officials and candidates. They showed photos of Parnas with Trump and Giuliani, who was the president’s personal lawyer, schmoozing at high-end political fundraisers.” Read more at Washington Post
“Relief flowed through Facebook in the days after the 2020 presidential election. The company had cracked down on misinformation, foreign interference and hate speech — and employees believed they had largely succeeded in limiting problems that, four years earlier, had brought on perhaps the most serious crisis in Facebook’s scandal-plagued history.
‘It was like we could take a victory lap,’ said a former employee, one of many who spoke for this story on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. ‘There was a lot of the feeling of high-fiving in the office.’
Many who had worked on the election, exhausted from months of unrelenting toil, took leaves of absence or moved on to other jobs. Facebook rolled back many of the dozens of election-season measures that it had used to suppress hateful, deceptive content. A ban the company had imposed on the original Stop the Steal group stopped short of addressing dozens of look-alikes that popped up in what an internal Facebook after-action report called ‘coordinated’ and ‘meteoric’ growth. Meanwhile, the company’s Civic Integrity team was largely disbanded by a management that had grown weary of the team’s criticisms of the company, according to former employees.
But the high fives, it soon became clear, were premature.
On Jan. 6, Facebook staffers expressed their horror in internal messages as they watched thousands of Trump supporters shouting ‘stop the steal’ and bearing the symbols of QAnon — a violent ideology that had spread widely on Facebook before an eventual crackdown — thronged the U.S. Capitol. Many bashed their way inside and battled to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of President Biden’s election victory.
Measures of online mayhem surged alarmingly on Facebook, with user reports of “false news” hitting nearly 40,000 per hour, an internal report that day showed. On Facebook-owned Instagram, the account reported most often for inciting violence was @realdonaldtrump — the president’s official account, the report showed.
Facebook has never publicly disclosed what it knows about how its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, helped fuel that day’s mayhem. The company rejected its own Oversight Board’s recommendation that it study how its policies contributed to the violence and has yet to fully comply with requests for data from the congressional commission investigating the events.
But thousands of pages of internal company documents disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by the whistleblower Frances Haugen offer important new evidence of Facebook’s role in the events. This story is based on those documents, as well on others independently obtained by The Washington Post, and on interviews with current and former Facebook employees. The documents include outraged posts on Workplace, an internal message system….
The SEC documents, which were provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel and reviewed by The Post and other news organizations, suggest that Facebook moved too quickly after the election to lift measures that had helped suppress some election-related misinformation.
The rushed effort to restore them on Jan. 6 was not enough to stop the surge of hateful, violent posts, documents show. A company after-action report concluded that in the weeks after the election, Facebook did not act forcefully enough against the Stop the Steal movement that was pushed by Trump’s political allies, even as its presence exploded across the platform.
The documents also provide ample support that the company’s internal research over several years had identified ways to diminish the spread of political polarization, conspiracy theories and incitements to violence but that in many instances, executives had declined to implement those steps.” Read more at Washington Post