
Global vaccine group Gavi secures $9 billion after funding summit
The group announced the total at the end of a fundraising summit in Brussels. It includes new pledges from donors like the United Kingdom and the Gates Foundation, as well as money left after COVID-19.
It did not include a pledge from the United States. Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr said that the United States would no longer fund Gavi and accused it of ignoring vaccine safety, without citing any evidence. In response, Gavi said safety was its primary concern.
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The Independent
41 minutes ago
- The Independent
Wes Streeting believes doctors ‘rushed' to strike
Health Secretary Wes Streeting accused resident doctors of squandering "considerable goodwill" by staging a five-day strike across England. Streeting stated he remains open to negotiations with the British Medical Association 's resident doctors committee, despite accusing them of "rushing" to strike. He reiterated that the government cannot offer pay rises but is prepared to discuss working conditions, career progression, and other financial benefits. The BMA co-chairs urged Streeting to make a credible offer, stating they want this to be their last strike. The strike impacted patients and the NHS, though fewer appointments were postponed compared to previous walkouts, which collectively led to 1.5 million cancellations.


Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
World's biggest study of trans children to include toddlers treated by NHS
The world's biggest study of trans children will include toddlers treated by the NHS. Children who are under 18 and already being treated by an NHS gender clinic for 'gender incongruence' are to be eligible for a new research project which is being launched today by King's College London. The 2024 Cass review found that the youngest child referred to a gender identity service (GIDS) run by the NHS was three years old. All NHS patients under 18 at gender clinics will be eligible for enrolment in the new study. Around 3,000 children and young people are expected to take part with the first participants to be on board by early autumn. The Cass review found that referrals to gender clinics had grown exponentially in the last decade with three-quarters of patients born female, it also found many patients have mental health conditions and autism. The researchers running the Pathways Horizon project expect the findings to shed light on the links between these trends and help unpick any potential mechanism as well as improving treatments. The study will contain ten times as many children as the largest previous studies and the investigators hope the data will provide better information to support trans children, their families and clinicians. Participants will be recruited over 3.5 years and the programme is one of a suite of five projects that received £10.7million in total funding and will run until 2031. One of the sister research projects, Pathways Trial, is planning to look into the role of puberty suppressants on children with gender incongruence and the data will crossover with the Horizon project. This project has not yet been approved by ethics boards or regulators and is not yet underway. The Horizon study launching today is observational and will only follow trans children throughout their normal NHS care and will involve annual questionnaires on wellbeing, mental and physical health, relationships and gender identity. Some of the main goals of the work are to understand how prevalence of gender incongruence — defined as a marked and persistent split between an individual's experienced gender and assigned sex — changes depending on sex, neurodivergence, autism, ADHD and other conditions. Dr Michael Absoud, a consultant in Paediatric Neurodisability at King's College London and Deputy Chief Investigator of Horizons said doctors 'know too little' about how different treatments work for their patients. 'This is why we're launching the Pathways Horizons today — to help fill the evidence gap,' he said. 'We know that a significant number of young people referred to the gender services are also neurodivergent, particularly those with autism, ADHD, or other cognitive differences and this study will help, in the future, to understand how neurodivergence intersects and overlaps with gender-related distress, and whether different types of support are needed to meet the unique needs of these young people presenting to our services. 'Ultimately, our goal is to help and shape the future services to help children, improve child health, support families, and also clinicians.' Little reliable data There is relatively little reliable data from large studies that follow participants for several years specifically on trans children and this study is designed to fill this void. Professor Emily Simonoff, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at King's College London and Chief Investigator of the study, said NHS England decided a study was needed to improve knowledge following the Cass review. 'We were tasked as a group to develop a robust program of research that would address questions raised in the Cass report,' she said. 'We were not told what to do. This is a study that we designed as a group of investigators.' The scientists are hoping the work will improve knowledge on the characteristics of people using youth gender services and also will compare the results of different treatment approaches while following the children in greater detail than ever before. 'More comprehensive' analysis Professor Richard Emsley, the study's statistician at King's College London, said the analysis will be more comprehensive than previous work. 'This will include first childhood experiences, social transitioning, neurodiversity such as autism and ADHD, and mental health symptoms including anxiety, depression, eating problems, and difficulty managing emotions,' he said. He added that the first papers from the trial will be published in a couple of years and will likely shed light on who is most likely to be using the NHS gender clinics as children. 'This includes their demographic characteristics, the prevalence of birth registered sex, and co-occurring conditions such as autism and ADHD.' He added: 'We won't be directly comparing different interventions. The best way to compare different interventions is in randomised control trials, but it will help us understand, for example, which groups of children and young people need more intensive input, which ones need less intensive input. 'It will help us to identify whether certain kinds of treatment packages seem to be more linked with good outcomes than others. 'That will allow us to develop further research in the future to pit interventions against each other or develop them in more detail.'


Sky News
5 hours ago
- Sky News
Renae died from a rare brain disease after getting measles as a baby. Now, her mother wants more children to get vaccines
The mother of a 10-year-old girl who died from complications of measles has urged parents to have their children vaccinated amid a surge of cases. Renae Archer was too young to have the MMR vaccine when she caught the infection at just five months old. A decade later, she was diagnosed with subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a very rare brain disease. She died in 2023. Her mother Becky believes Renae might not have caught measles if more people had inoculated their children. The warning comes as rates of vaccine uptake continue to fall. The recent death of a child with measles at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool put the focus on a surge of cases in a city with low levels of vaccination. It has left communities with rates of vaccination below the 95% level seen to provide herd immunity, where enough people are protected to prevent the virus spreading. Becky Archer said: "It does make me quite sad and angry because they are potentially putting their children at risk. "We just want people to open their eyes to someone that's actually been through it and not the nonsense that's being spread out on social media or on telly. "I just want people to be knowledgeable of how serious a situation can be." The latest figures on childhood vaccination show that coverage in the UK has been falling in recent years and is now below that target of 95% for all vaccines by age five. The vaccination rate for England is lower than in other UK nations, and particularly low in London. Just 60% in Hackney have had their full measles vaccination course by their fifth birthday, compared to 89.2% on average across Scotland - though the rate in Scotland has also fallen from 93% a decade earlier. Outside of London, the North West now has among the lowest vaccination rates for most of the main childhood vaccines. Liverpool has the lowest measles vaccination rate outside of London, with more than a quarter of children not completing a full MMR vaccination course by their fifth birthday, according to the latest NHS figures for 2023/24. Seventeen cases of measles have been recorded at Alder Hey in recent weeks, and doctors are reassuring parents that the vaccine is safe, free and available. The hospital's chief nurse Nathan Askew said: "Measles is often thought of as just a routine childhood illness but actually it's incredibly contagious. "The problem is that when that's passed on, particularly in schools, nurseries and other environments where children are close together, there's a real problem with children becoming unwell." Low immunisation rates have been blamed on vaccine hesitancy among parents, but experts say a lack of information on the importance and availability of vaccines is also a significant factor. At a catch-up clinic in Liverpool, parents including Natalia Figeuroa have been bringing their children in. She admits she lost track of her son's vaccinations, but worries that parents are being confused. "I think parents are trying to make the right decision but the misinformation that's out there is overclouding their judgement," she said. "My child attends a specialist provision which is a school that carries many children with disabilities, physically and mentally, and it's really hard to see that those kids could be exposed to an illness that is quite preventable with a vaccine. "I'm hoping parents will start to think not only about their own children but those other children who cannot get vaccinations for numerous reasons." Becky Archer was due to give birth the day she was told that Renae's condition was fatal. She died a few days later, and her mother believes she would want her story told. "She was really caring person and she wouldn't have wanted any other family to go through losing their child," she said.