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Some experts are concerned and others are unsure about the policy’s specifics because US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reversed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation in a one-minute video.

Kennedy was joined in the video, posted on May 27 on X, by Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.

Kennedy, who was chosen by President Donald Trump after a  years-long embrace of vaccine conspiracy theories, did not specify whether he was speaking to recommend that pregnant women get their first booster shots, or both. No clarity was provided on the HHS website, which stated that “everyone 6 months and older can get COVID-19 vaccines.” Getting vaccinated is the best way to help protect people from COVID-19″. A similar broad vaccine endorsement was provided on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage from January 7 before Kennedy became secretary.

Some experts believe that tightening the federal vaccine recommendation is due to the low rates of serious COVID-19 cases in children. Others say that the move will make it harder to get vaccinated and cause preventable serious illnesses.

Kennedy broke the law by refusing to hold a scheduled meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to vote on vaccine guidance.

If insurers choose not to cover COVID-19 shots for those groups, suggesting against vaccination for some groups might make it more difficult for most children and pregnant women to get the shot. Immunization rates are already low, with 13 percent of children and 14.4 percent of pregnant women up to date with the 2024-25 edition of the COVID-19 vaccine, the CDC found in late April.

Health experts and three federal health officials’ statements were fact-checked by us.

Kennedy claimed that vaccine boosters for children lacked clinical information.

Kennedy said, “Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data to support the repeat booster strategy in children”.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a group of outside experts who advise the CDC on when and how frequently to immunize healthy children who have already received COVID-19 vaccines, has recommended annual boosters in recent years.

According to Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, the committee made this recommendation without also recommending that the vaccine go through new rounds of clinical trials each year before being used. (The vaccine had been approved by the FDA for safety and efficacy early in the pandemic.) According to Schaffner, a former committee member and current adviser, the panel came to the conclusion that the coronavirus vaccine operated similarly to the annual flu vaccine, which didn’t require repeated clinical trials.

The American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics both recommended COVID-19 vaccinations for children, but they did not demand any new clinical trials.

Kids generally don’t need the vaccination, FDA chief said

According to Makary, “Healthy kids don’t need” the vaccine.

This dispute persists. Most children will not face serious illness from COVID-19, but a small fraction will. Given this level of risk, experts have various opinions on how widespread the vaccination program is.

Children and adolescents 17 and younger made up about 4% of COVID-19-associated hospitalizations during the COVID-19 season in the years 2024 to 2025. The relatively small number of serious cases among children has driven the belief among some scientists that the universal vaccination recommendation is too broad.

Infants under six months old were the youngest among all children, with the highest rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations.

According to Schaffner, who cited a September 2024&nbsp, article&nbsp, on the CDC’s website, “With 4 million new children born every year without being exposed to COVID, young children have rates of disease comparable to those of people over 65.”

COVID-19 was among the top 10 causes of death in children during the worst of the pandemic between 2020 and 2022, said Tara C Smith, a Kent State University epidemiologist. Why don’t we continue to vaccinate for COVID even though we may no longer be at that stage?

Some doctors are concerned about the persistent condition known as long COVID, which is more well known, particularly in children.

The outside advisory committees and the medical academies found this level of serious disease to be sufficient to recommend continued annual vaccinations.

According to Makary, this strategy is comparable to that in other nations.

Makary was accurate when he claimed that “most nations have stopped recommending” routine COVID-19 vaccination for children.

“Many countries will only offer the COVID vaccine to children if they have underlying health conditions or are immunocompromised”, said Brooke Nichols, a Boston University associate professor of global health.

A list of booster recommendations from Canada, Europe, and Australia was included in Makary’s May 20 article. In the majority of nations, it was said that the advice was to vaccine older people or those who were at high risk.

Most countries have taken this course, Schaffner said, because “by now, 95 percent of us have had experience with COVID, either through the vaccine or through illness or both. Second, it is believed that the current variants are much milder than some of the earlier ones.

The World Health Organization, in its 2024 report, recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for children who had never been immunized. For children and adolescents who had previously been vaccinated, it did not routinely recommend revaccination.

The European Medicines Agency, which received the vaccine, made a recommendation for children over the age of five and said it was safe and effective. According to Euronews, the organization made its recommendation in November 2021 and later made it a recommendation for the vaccination of children between the ages of 12 and 17?

In the United Kingdom, “only older people or those with specific diseases or illnesses making them susceptible to severe COVID were recommended to get boosters, and as a result, uptake in those groups was actually higher than in the US”, where outreach and advertising for the vaccinations focused on children as well as older people, said Babak Javid, an associate professor in the division of experimental medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

The New York Times discovered that “many countries in Europe do not recommend the shots for healthy children under five, but the shots are approved for everyone who is at least six months old.”

According to doctors, the vaccine helps to protect expecting mothers.

Experts disagreed with Kennedy’s recommendation against vaccinating pregnant women, saying the vaccine protects pregnant women and their infants.

The president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Steven J. Fleischman, stated, “It is very clear that a pregnancy can lead to a catastrophic disability and severe family consequences. Growing evidence suggests that the infant is best protected after birth when the majority of hospitalized infants born to unvaccinated mothers are less than six months old.

After a vaccination, antibodies reach the fetus. Although there may be fever or pain at the injection site, the doctors’ group asserted that there is no conclusive evidence that the vaccine has any negative effects on the mother or the fetus.

In May, the federal government released contradictory information about pregnancy and the vaccine.

In Makary’s May 20&nbsp, article, he and his co-author included pregnancy on the CDC’s 2025 list of underlying medical conditions that increase the risk of severe COVID-19.

According to Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, “they literally contradicted themselves over the course of a few days.” “It appears that RFK Jr. reversed the decision of his own FDA.”

Following the May 27 video announcement, Makary&nbsp, told NBC&nbsp, that the decision about vaccination should be between a pregnant woman and her doctor.

A review of 67 studies conducted in 2024 found that pregnant women who had been fully immunized had a 61% lower chance of contracting COVID-19 while pregnant.

What comes next?

In its June meeting, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices might move towards less sweeping recommendations for vaccinating children, closer to those that Kennedy enacted.

The discussions in the most recent previous meeting, according to Schaffner, appeared to be moving in a more targeted direction.

According to Schaffner, the advisory committees may suggest more flexibility with vaccine usage than Kennedy’s video statement suggests when it comes to pregnant women.

Other areas where the panels could back greater flexibility could be for otherwise healthy people who serve as caregivers or who live with more vulnerable people who are advanced in age or are immunocompromised.

Poland’s Warsaw, Poland, saw the parade through the capital for one last time last Sunday, June 1, as two presidential hopefuls and their supporters walked into the country’s capital for the second round of voting for the nation’s next president.

Rafał Trzaskowski from the centre-right Civic Platform of the governing Civic Coalition and Karol Nawrocki, an independent candidate supported by the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which ran Poland between 2015 and 2023, are the two remaining contenders in the election. Trzaskowski won 31 in the first polls round on May 18. Nawrocki received 29 percent of the votes, while Nawrocki received 1%. 5 percent.

Polling organizations claim that the final round’s vote is evenly split between the two candidates so far. 47 is based on a poll conducted by IBRiS for Polish news outlet Onet. 7 percent of respondents intend to vote for Trzaskowski, with 46 percent indicating they will vote for Nawrocki. The rest are unsure.

Andrzej Duda, the incoming nationalist conservative president who was supported by PiS and who is accused of stifling justice reforms by using his veto against the government, will be replaced by one of the two.

This is a hotly contested race. Concerning the European Union, national security, and social values, Trzaskowski and Nawrocki clashed. Both candidates have used anti-Ukrainian rhetoric in a similar hardline way to immigration, while also reviving growing animosity among Poles, who view themselves as a front-runner for strained social services with 1. 55 million Ukrainian migrants and war refugees.

Nawrocki went further, saying he would oppose Ukraine joining NATO or even the EU, while Trzaskowski has suggested that only working Ukrainians should be able to access the nation’s child benefit.

‘Every vote is needed’

Trzaskowski addressed his opponent at his “Patriots’ March,” which attracted about 140,000 supporters over the weekend and called for unity.

It’s high time for truth to prevail. It’s high time for integrity to win. Justice must now prevail. Truth must now prevail. That’s what these elections are about,” he declared to a cheering crowd.

It takes a lot of determination. Every vote is required. So that the future wins. so that Poland overall wins. ”

Trzaskowski has served as Warsaw’s mayor since 2018. His remarks about “honesty” are interpreted as a reference to a recent article about Nawrocki allegedly buying an elderly man’s apartment in Gdansk in exchange for a pledge to care for him. The man’s family claims that the promise was broken, and he was taken to a state nursing facility.

In response, Nawrocki has said he will donate the flat to charity and pointed out that under Trzaskowski’s mayorship, families had been evicted from state accommodation in Warsaw.

Contrary to Nawrocki, Trzaskowski has supported calls for LGBTQ rights as well as the liberalization of the nation’s strict abortion law in the past. He is viewed as a more liberal candidate than his opponent. However, he has largely avoided these topics during this campaign. If elected, he would be more likely to help the governing coalition pass various bills, primarily reforms to the rule of law and the justice system, which have so far been blocked by Duda.

Bartosz Rydlinski, a political scientist at the Warsaw-based Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University, predicted that Rafa Trzaskowski would be a pro-European politician. He would first travel to Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. He would try to maintain close relations with the US, but focus on strengthening the European component, both in the European Union and in NATO. ”

US endorsement for Nawrocki

Nearly 50,000 people participated in Nawrocki’s weekend “March for Poland” through central Warsaw, which highlighted his nationalist, pro-Catholic, and free-market views. He contends that Poland should prioritize its relationship with the US over the EU.

But his real triumph came this week when he received an official endorsement from Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump’s secretary of homeland security.

At the annual gathering of US conservative activists and officials called the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPA), Nawrocki presented his vision for Poland’s future on Tuesday. Although the event typically takes place in the US, it took place in Hungary in 2022. This year, it was held in the Polish town of Jasionka, southeastern Poland, close to the air and shipment hub which supplies weapons and aid to Ukraine.

Relations with the United States are based on a solid foundation of values for Poles and us. The audience, which included US Secretary of Homeland Security Noem, Vice President JD Vance, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk, and former White House political strategist Steve Bannon, who served as president in 2017 for the first time, included him.

“My opponent, Rafał Trzaskowski, is playing dishonestly,” said Nawrocki, who claims Trzaskowski would follow EU orders blindly, including on relaxing immigration rules. He also doesn’t want to reveal what his true vision for Poland after June 1st, 2025 is, despite lying in public debates and being caught in these lies. This notion is also glaring. Speed ​​up the migration pact, speed up the climate pact and pursue a policy that is important for Brussels, not for our security. ”

After a long week of negative news, Nawrocki received a much-needed boost from the event.

First, on May 22, Slawomir Mentzen, the far-right leader of Konfederacja, who finished third in the first round of the presidential election, claimed that Nawrocki had participated in a fight between football hooligans in 2014, which Nawrocki has never denied.

Then, in a TV debate the following day, he was seen placing a small sachet on his gum, thought to be filled with tobacco, but which prompted speculation that he might have been taking drugs. On Tuesday, Nawrocki responded with a negative result from her drug test.

Onet later published a news story claiming that Nawrocki had participated in the supply of prostitutes to guests of the Grand Hotel in Sopot, where he worked as a security guard, when he was a young man. Nawrocki denied the claims and, in a post on X, stated that he would sue the outlet.

However, it appears that his support has not changed as a result of the negative news.

He was 28 when the hooligan fight occurred, and I don’t think that’s a problem because I believe men should be able to fight. When it comes to other issues – everyone can make a mistake, and it does not have to mean bad intentions,” said Marcin Mamon, a right-wing freelance journalist who claimed the alleged scandals involving Nawrocki have been exaggerated.

Voting for a conservative or right-wing candidate is a declaration of values, such as the Catholic faith. Voting for the opposing candidate would mean I would vote against abortion and against the Church. ”

Parliamentary impasse

For the former PiS government to reverse contentious judicial reforms, especially those that pertain to the judiciary’s independence, having a like-minded president would be crucial.

As a result of the changes, which were deemed to contradict European law, in 2021, the European Union imposed penalties on Poland. Civic Platform was elected in 2023 with the promise to reverse the contentious laws, but because President Duda has the power to veto and would veto any attempts to change the law.

A total war with the government would be won by Nawrocki, according to Rydlinski. “He would be a much more conservative president than Andrzej Duda, and he would probably refer many bills to the Constitutional Tribunal, which is still under the control of judges elected by the Law and Justice government. ”

A victory for Nawrocki, in the opinion of experts, would also put Poland and Europe on a collision course.

“Karol Nawrocki would very strongly opt for bilateral relations between Warsaw and Washington, breaking up the EU’s unity,” Rydlinski said. He would have a major conflict with Germany, deteriorate relations with France, and undoubtedly a conflict with Brussels. He would also be a mini-Trump in Central Europe. ”

Nawrocki’s conservatism and fascination with Trump have sparked concern among some Polish voters. People who voted for left-wing or centrist candidates in the first round are likely to ally themselves now, not against what they perceive as Nawrocki’s Trump-like outlook for Poland.

The candidates who lost in the first round have indicated their support for Trzaskowski, and they are expected to do the same for their supporters.

“Putting a cross next to Trzaskowski will not come easy for me,” said Zofia Szeremet, a 20-year-old student based in Warsaw who voted for the left-wing leader of the Razem party, Adrian Zandberg, in the first round. However, I have no way of thinking of not participating in such a significant election. Trzaskowski is a guarantee for Poland’s pro-European course, despite my disagreements on many fronts.

“Nawrocki is anti-EU, anti-Ukrainian, inexperienced and incompetent, and I don’t imagine a president having ties with hooligan movements. ”

A close call

Polls are inconclusive when it comes to the election favourite. However, the first round of the voting revealed that the two largest parties have grown weary of maintaining their supremacy.

The Nawrocki and Trzaskowski results are slightly above 60%, which is the worst result since 2005 when added up. It is clear that Poles are looking for an alternative, and not only on the right, but also to the left,” said Marcin Palade, political sociologist and expert on electoral geography in Poland. Andrzej Duda and Rafal Trzaskowski, the top two candidates in the 2020 presidential election, won almost 74% of the vote.

The polls had predicted that Rafa Trzaskowski’s performance would be below what the odds were that he could win in the worst possible way, according to Palade. “Nawrocki had the worst result a PiS candidate has had since 2005, below the ratings of the party that has stood behind him. ”

A fake sign proclaims the Melkio St. Joseph Missions of Messiah Church in Africa, which is perched in the grass along the Rongo-Homa Bay Road in Kenya’s Migori County. Beyond it, a sandy path meets big blue and purple gates that barricade the now-deserted grounds from view.

When rumors of secret burials and “cult-like” practices came to light just over a month ago, the church in Opapo village.

On April 21, local police stormed the grounds and discovered two bodies buried within the fenced compound – including that of a police officer who was also a church member – as well as dozens of other worshippers who had been living there.

57 people were saved and taken into custody during the raid. In the weeks since, most have been released, but police have banned them from returning to the church and sealed off the compound.

For Kenyans, the incident has opened the minds of other contentious churches that are rife with abuse allegations, such as the 2023 case in which more than 400 members of a church-cult were killed in the Shakahola Forest.

In Opapo village, residents are troubled by the deaths&nbsp, and the decades-long secrecy surrounding the church. Many people support the compound’s permanent closure and exhumation and burial of the dead there.

Brian Juma, 27, has lived directly beside the church all his life. According to him, the church’s followers prayed to a man who had established himself as a sort of god figure.

Juma claims that when the church leader died 10 years ago, followers did not immediately bury him but prayed for three days in the hope that he would rise.

The congregation was established in their area in the early 1990s, according to Pauline Auma, a 53-year-old mother of six who also resides close to the church.

“When it came, we thought it was a normal church like any other. My sister once said that the place was like other churches when she attended one, but she later came over and explained that things weren’t going to go as planned. For example, she said the Father there claimed to be God himself”, Auma recounted.

The church began recruiting new members from various locations throughout the nation in the years that followed. Juma said congregants were not from around the area, spoke different languages, and never left the compound to go to their own homes.

The church has several branches in the Kenyan Nyanza region, and members move from one location to the next, according to Caren Kiarie, a human rights activist from neighboring Kisumu County.

Many people came to worship and live within the church full time, Opapo villagers remember.

“They were very friendly people who did business around the Opapo area and interacted well with the people here”, Juma said. They all returned inside the church in the evening, but they would never live there. Within the church compound, they had cattle, sheep, poultry and planted crops for their food”.

Locals claim that the worshippers’ children, some with their parents and others who neighbors claimed were taken in alone, never attended school, and that they were prohibited from seeking medical care if they were ill.

On the day of the police raid and rescue, many of the worshippers looked weak and ill, said Juma, who over the years befriended some young people whose parents belonged to the church. He remarked, “They were sick because they were never allowed to go to the hospital or even take pain medication,” citing what his neighbors had already said to him. Auma believes those who were rescued that day were the sickly ones, as the others had escaped.

The 57 initially objected to leaving the compound, insisting that the church was their only “home.” But police took them to the nearby Rongo Sub-county Hospital to be treated. Instead of resending medical bills, they began singing Christian praise songs in Dholuo. Auma said the songs were chants asking God to save them and take them home to heaven.

Health workers advised them to be moved out of the hospital because they were disturbing other patients. That’s when they were taken into police custody. The worshippers were released from police custody two weeks ago, but the assistant county commissioner, Josphat Kingoku, was unaware of where they were.

Seeking news about loved ones

Linet Achieng, a 71-year-old mother who left home to join the Migori church 11 years ago and never returned, worries about her in Homa Bay County’s Kwoyo.

Her mother was introduced to the church by a neighbour who was originally from Migori, Achieng said.

She had previously visited the church to seek medical attention after a backache that had troubled her for years, according to the 43-year-old, adding that the church had provided health guarantees.

The family initially kept in touch with their mother, asking when she would come home after being healed. She made repeated promises to return, but they never did. Achieng tried to convince her mother to leave the place, she said, but her attempts&nbsp, were in vain.

She abruptly stopped talking to us, and when my younger brother and I went to see how she was doing, we were told to leave the church and told to stay there until we were ready, she said.

After the raid last month, Achieng learned her mother was among those rescued but says she does not want anything to do with her family.

One family is certain they will never see their loved one again, despite the many families of worshipers who wait to learn about their relatives.

According to local media reports, one of the victims was police constable Dan Ayo Obura, who passed away at the church compound on March 27.

He had been introduced to the church by his wife, who was a leader there, his relatives said.

According to his uncle Dickson Otieno, Obura left his job at the General Service Unit police headquarters&nbsp in Nairobi in February and then traveled on sick leave to Kisumu County.

He was taken to a hospital in the area, but after a week at the facility, “he disappeared”, Otieno told Al Jazeera.

We called the police, where we discovered him, and began to search for him everywhere in apprehension. Later, we had information from some neighbours that he is in Migori at a church. We then went there and inquired about him with the church leaders. They told us he was not at the church and had not seen him.

They called us about a month later to inform us that the person we were searching for had passed away the night before and that he had been buried that day.

The family then informed the police and human rights activists like Kiarie, and travelled to Opapo to try and locate his body.

In March, Kiarie, a rights advocate and paralegal at the Nyando Social Justice Centre, took the family to Opapo.

” We’ve not been given the body, “she told Al Jazeera, explaining that she interviewed residents and church members while in Opapo and heard concerning reports about what was happening at the compound.

She claimed that no one at the church was permitted to have intimate relationships, and that both husbands and wives had to break up after joining. These practices&nbsp, were echoed by the compound’s neighbours in Migori.

According to Kelly, “There are also serious allegations of sexual violence at the church where the male leaders were having sex with the female and male leaders there.” That was why they did not want any man inside to touch the women because they belonged to them, “she alleged.

According to Kiarie, the compound’s neighbors have reported that there may be more than just two bodies buried inside since the police raid, which she said could be the reason Obura’s exhumation is stalled by. They’re still waiting because they said the issue has been picked up by the national government, and they]the national authorities] want to exhume the other bodies]that may be there], “she said.

If it is discovered that more people actually died and were buried there without their families’ knowledge, Kiarie believes the Migori church could turn out to be another instance of the Shakahola cult massacre.

From Migori to Shakahola

The events in Migori have opened wounds for many survivors and relatives of the 429 people who were starved to death in Kilifi County’s Shakahola, in 2023.

The congregationalists there also abandoned their homes and property in search of a meeting with their messiah, led by Pastor Paul McKenzie. But news reports said that at the church, they were radicalised and brainwashed, convinced that if they stopped eating they would die peacefully, go to heaven and meet their god.

The 32-year-old Kilifi mother of three claims that both Grace Kazungu’s parents and two of her siblings perished in the Shakhola church cult.

Whenever she and her brother tried to question the church’s teachings, the others would not hear a word against it, she told Al Jazeera.

They would argue that our church was the only holy and sacred way to heaven, and that we were “anti-Christ,” she said.

” Months later, I heard from my brother that they had sold the family’s property and were going to live inside the church after ditching earthly possessions.

“Our attempts to reach them were blocked by their leader. My husband broke the news to me one morning after a year that they had been found inside the forest and they were dead and buried”.

They were interred in mass graves within the church’s Shakahola Forest after their deaths. Upon discovery, following a tip from the local media, the police launched an operation to cordon off the area so they could exhume the bodies, test for DNA, and return the deceased to their relatives for proper burial.

Later, they detained the church’s leader, McKenzie, and charged him with “terrorism,” child torture, and the murder of 191 people. He and several other co-accused remain in police custody, pending sentencing.

In Opapo and Rongo towns, the Migori church’s followers were able to work, eat, and run their own businesses, in contrast to Shakahola. But like Shakahola, it also kept them living apart from the rest of society, barred them from accessing school, marriage and medical care, and severely punished supposed transgressions, according to locals who heard and witnessed violent beatings and fights inside the compound.

Religious leaders are frequently influenced by their beliefs and behavior in both the private and public domains in many societies, according to Fathima Azmiya Badurdee, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

“People are in search of ‘ hope ‘ in the daily issues they confront. Religious leaders play a crucial role in giving people hope for their futures, or even for life after death, she explained.

Still, “awareness among religious communities on opportunistic leadership and cult dynamics is needed”, she said, referring to the Opapo and Shakahola forest cases.

“Many people don’t question religious leaders, but they do so blindly. Words and opinions of religious leaders are taken as the gospel truth. She continued, “People frequently believe in any extreme forms propagated by these leaders due to their lack of questioning, critical thinking, or even religious literacy.”

I’m concerned that she might pass away.

Most of the 57 Migori worshippers are now back in society once more. While investigations and autopsies continued this month, police extended the arrest of four key suspects.

Assistant county commissioner Kingoku declined to provide details to Al Jazeera about any charges against the worshippers, saying they did not appear in court.

According to Michael Muchiri, a spokesman for the Kenyan National Police Service, “everyone found guilty will be prosecuted as directed by the law,”

Investigations are ongoing into Obura’s cause of death, verification of additional burials alleged by residents, and a probe into whether the church operated as an unregistered “company” rather than a licensed religious organisation.

The church had been allegedly registered as a business without proper authorization, according to Mutua Kisilu, the county commissioner. After the raid last month, Nyanza regional commissioner, Florence Mworoa, announced a region-wide crackdown on unregistered churches.

Muchiri claimed that the government oversees religious organizations and will prosecute anyone found guilty of breaking the law.

“Any illegally operating organisation – the government has been clear about it – is quickly shut down. Following is the Migori case, similar to the prosecution. Identification of such ‘ cult-like ‘ illegal religious entities is through the local intelligence and security teams and information from the local people”, Muchiri said.

After the worshippers were released from custody, Achieng finally spoke to her mother in Homa Bay one more time. She told her daughter that she had found a new home and that her family were “worldly” people who she should never associate with again.

I anticipated releasing her after she was released from police custody, but I was concerned that she might not agree to go home with me, Achieng told Al Jazeera. She believes her mother will never return home. At the church, I worry that she might pass away.

Meanwhile in Kisumu, Obura’s family continues to mourn him as they work with Kiarie’s organisation and the police to try and secure a court order allowing them to exhume his remains.

According to Luo culture and customs, all they want is for him to be buried at his ancestral home and be removed from the church.