Bush to meet with vaccine makers
Washington President Bush summoned vaccine manufacturers to a White House meeting today, hoping to personally boost the rickety industry amid increasing fears of a worldwide outbreak of bird flu.
This month, vaccine maker Sanofi-Pasteur begins the first mass production of a new vaccine that promises to protect against bird flu, producing $100 million worth of inoculations for a government stockpile. But it would take months to create a new vaccine from scratch if a different strain of bird flu than today’s known as H5N1 emerges.
Bush called together the heads of major vaccine companies “to press ahead to expand our manufacturing capacity for a vaccine to address this risk,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday.
On the agenda for today’s meeting is liability, McClellan said. If healthy people suffer side effects from a vaccine, manufacturers can face huge lawsuits, one reason many companies have left the business in the last two decades. Another reason is that vaccines simply aren’t very profitable, especially flu vaccine.
Air Force sued over religion at academy
Albuquerque, N.M. A Jewish father of two Air Force Academy cadets sued the Air Force on Thursday, claiming senior officers and cadets illegally imposed Christianity on others at the school.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court by Mikey Weinstein, an academy graduate and outspoken critic of the school’s handling of religion.
Over the past decade or more, the lawsuit claims, academy leaders have fostered an environment of religious intolerance at the Colorado school, in violation of the First Amendment.
Weinstein has one son who graduated from the academy last year and another who is a junior there. Both were subjected to anti-Semitic slurs from evangelical Christian cadets, he said.
Weinstein, who lives in Albuquerque, claims that evangelical Christians at the school have coerced attendance at religious services and prayers at official events, among other things.
Democrats call for new Abramoff investigation
Washington Two Democratic congressmen on Thursday called for appointment of an outside special counsel to investigate whether lobbyist Jack Abramoff played a role in the demotion of a U.S. attorney in Guam who was investigating him.
Reps John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and George Miller, D-Calif., cited what they called evidence of “political manipulation” in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Abramoff already is the subject of investigations by a Senate committee and a federal grand jury on charges related to his multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts for Indian tribes with casino operations. He was recently indicted in Florida on unrelated fraud charges.
On Aug. 7, the Los Angeles Times first disclosed that Frederick Black, the longtime acting U.S. attorney for Guam and the Northern Marianas, was removed from office in late 2002 shortly after the prosecutor launched an investigation of a lobbying deal between Abramoff and Guam court officials. The investigation was subsequently dropped.
Body found in case of abandoned girl
New York Police said they believe a body recovered at a Pennsylvania landfill Thursday is the mother of a 4-year-old girl found abandoned and barefoot on a city street after dark.
A woman’s corpse — unclothed and wrapped in black plastic bags — was found under 18 feet of trash in the landfill in Vintondale, Pa., said police spokesman Paul Browne.
The body was not positively identified, but investigators believe it is that of Monica Lozada-Rivadineira, Browne said.
Police, who suspect the woman’s companion of killing her and dumping her body in a trash pile, had been searching two landfills in Pennsylvania where New York City’s garbage is hauled.
Lozada-Rivadineira’s companion, Cesar Ascarrunz, is being held without bail on charges of strangling her, dumping her body and abandoning her daughter on the street.