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LONDON: The Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Wednesday condemned the UK prime minister’s framing of Palestinian statehood.

Keir Starmer pledged to recognize a Palestinian state in September if Israel fails to reach a ceasefire with Hamas, among other conditions.

Placing the Palestinian right to self-determination “within the context of Israel’s actions” is “shameful,” the PSC said in a statement, adding that it is an “inalienable right” that should be recognized regardless of Israel’s conduct.

Starmer’s apparent shift, which followed in French President Emmanuel Macron’s footsteps, “came in part because of intense pressure from the British public, expressed in the huge protest movement that has persevered over many months,” the PSC said.

Since the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023, the PSC and a host of other campaign groups have led regular protest marches through British cities.

The protests have swelled in size amid mounting public anger over Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as well as the UK government’s perceived reluctance to take action against it.

Protesters have focused on British ties to Israel and its military, waging boycott campaigns against companies with ties to the Israel Defense Forces.

“Every British MP and government official is also aware of the fact that British-exported weapons are being used by the Israeli military in its brutality against Palestinian civilians and complete devastation of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure,” the PSC said.

“British politicians are now bemoaning the images of horror, but continuing to act as partners in Israel’s genocide by maintaining trade with Israel, including in weapons and other military items, and by implementing limited sanctions on a few individual ministers, as though Israel’s genocide is being engineered and carried out by a ‘few bad apples.’”

The PSC condemned Starmer’s move this week as “grotesque,” and one that tells Palestinians: “State recognition may come, but only if and when many, many more of you are dead.”

Rather than representing a turning point, his decision is “simply more of the same,” the PSC said, describing the pledge as having been “added to the package of collusion and complicity with genocide.”

It called on the government to take immediate steps and “everything in their power” to secure an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. The UK must also place a comprehensive weapons embargo on Israel, the PSC demanded.

“Keir Starmer claims support for the Palestinian right to self-determination while ensuring that Israel has all the means it needs to eradicate the Palestinian people and annex their land,” it said.

“The British public will not be fooled into holding out hope for the possibility of a symbolic gesture granted by the British government in September.”
 

NEW YORK: The 17 experts who were ousted from a government vaccine committee last month say they have little faith in what the panel has become, and have outlined possible alternative ways to make US vaccine policy.
US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, accusing them of being too closely aligned with manufacturers and of rubber-stamping vaccines. He handpicked replacements that include several vaccine skeptics.
In a commentary published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy — a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the US government’s top health official — and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation.
That was clear, they said, during the new panel’s first meeting, in June. It featured a presentation by an anti-vaccine advocate that warned of dangers about a preservative used in a few flu vaccines, but the committee members didn’t hear from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staffers about an analysis that concluded there was no link between the preservative and neurodevelopmental disorders.
The new panel recommended that the preservative, thimerosal, be removed even as some members acknowledged there was no proof it was causing harm.
“That meeting was a travesty, honestly,” said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.
The 17 discharged experts last month published a shorter essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association that decried Kennedy’s “destabilizing decisions.” The focus was largely on their termination and on Kennedy’s decision in May to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
In the new commentary, the ousted committee members took it one step further and prescribed some steps that could be taken to maintain scientifically sound vaccine recommendations.
“An alternative to the Committee should be established quickly and — if necessary — independently from the federal government,” they wrote. “No viable pathway exists to fully replace the prior trusted and unbiased ACIP structure and process. Instead, the alternatives must focus on limiting the damage to vaccination policy in the United States.”
Options included having professional organizations working together to harmonize vaccine recommendations or establishing an external auditor of ACIP recommendations. There are huge challenges to the ideas, including having access to the best data, the authors acknowledged.
There’s also the question of whether health insurers would pay for vaccinations that are recommended by alternative groups but not ACIP.
They might pick and choose which vaccines to cover, said the University of North Carolina’s Noel Brewer, another former ACIP member.
For example, they might pay for vaccines that offer more immediate cost savings for health care, like the flu vaccine.
“But maybe not ones that have a longer-term benefit like HPV vaccine,” which is designed to prevent futures cancers, Brewer said.
Officials with the US Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.