Total Doses Distributed = 705,978,645. Total Doses Administered = 562,935,409. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 255,838,817. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 217,955,850.
COVID-19 Vaccination Data Updates
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Most of the defendants in Florida’s lawsuit over the opioid epidemic have settled for more than $870 million, according to the state attorney general. One remains: Walgreens Co. is not giving up.
A jury has been seated in Pasco County, Florida, just north of Tampa, to hear the state’s case against Walgreens, a huge drug store chain with more than 9,000 outlets on streetcorners throughout the country. Opening statements are set for early next week.
The Deerfield, Illinois-based company says it will not settle.
“We are prepared for trial,” said Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman in an email.
Florida, led by Attorney General Ashley Moody, contends that Walgreens has been an integral part of the opioid epidemic. As examples of excess, Moody said in a statement that one Walgreens outlet sold 2.2 million opioid tablets in the town of Hudson, Florida, which has about 12,000 residents. Other Walgreens locations, according to the state, increased their orders for opioids by 600% in a two-year period.
“It’s time for Walgreens to face accountability for their part in fueling the opioid crisis, and my team is prepared to vigorously try our strong case against them,” Moody said in a statement.
Walgreens denies the state’s allegations.
The opioid epidemic has been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. over the past two decades, counting those from prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and generic oxycodone as well as illicit drugs such as heroin and illegally produced fentanyl.
In the same case as Walgreens, Moody said CVS Health Corp. and CVS Pharmacy Inc. will pay the state $484 million. Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. agreed to pay $195 million and Allergan PLC more than $134 million.
Florida has previously obtained millions of dollars in opioid settlements involving McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc., Johnson & Johnson Inc. and AmerisourceBergen Corp.
That leaves Walgreens, at the moment, as the sole defendant in Florida’s opioid case.
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma has a tentative nationwide deal that includes $6 billion in cash from members of the Sackler family who own the company; drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and the distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson have finalized settlements totaling $26 billion.
In all, settlements, civil and criminal penalties since 2007 have totaled over $45 billion, according to an Associated Press tally.
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Confronting the pandemic’s lasting shadow, President Joe Biden on Tuesday is ordering a new national research push on long COVID, while also directing federal agencies to support patients dealing with the mysterious and debilitating condition.
The White House said Biden is assigning the Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate an urgent new initiative across federal agencies, building on research already under way at the National Institutes of Health.
Biden also directed federal agencies to support patients and doctors by providing science-based best practices for treating long COVID, maintaining access to insurance coverage, and protecting the rights of workers as they try to return to jobs while coping with the uncertainties of the malaise.
Long COVID is the catch-all term for a hydra-headed condition whose symptoms can include brain fog, recurring shortness of breath, pain and fatigue. It is roughly estimated to affect as many as 1 in 3 people who recover from COVID-19, although the severity and duration of symptoms vary. Despite intense investigation, the causes of long COVID are not yet well understood and treatment largely focuses on helping patients cope with their symptoms as they try to rebalance daily routines.
The White House also acknowledged that long COVID appears to be a disability, meaning that patients could be entitled to the protection of federal laws that prohibit discrimination on account of health conditions and seek to create pathways for leading productive lives.
“The administration recognizes that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in new members of the disability community and has had a tremendous impact on people with disabilities,” said a White House statement.
Some independent experts praised the Biden administration for a comprehensive plan to meet an emerging need but noted the lack of timeline for delivering results.
“This is a very important move on the part of the Biden administration to acknowledge that long COVID is real, that it is a significant threat, and that much more needs to be done,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner and commentator on the pandemic. “The emphasis on treatment for long COVID and the recognizing this could be a source of ongoing disability are long overdue.”
Medical research thus far has led to theories about what causes long COVID, but no single root. One theory revolves around lingering infection or virus remnants that may trigger inflammation in the body. Another possibility involves autoimmune system responses that mistakenly attack normal cells. Researchers are also investigating the role of tiny clots.
The White House said Biden’s order will expand and build on a $1 billion research study already underway at NIH, called the RECOVER Initiative. One goal is to speed signing up 40,000 people with and without long COVID into the study. Around that effort, Health and Human Services will coordinate a government-wide research plan on long COVID.
Treatment is another major focus. An HHS unit called the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will investigate best practices and get useful guidance to doctors, hospitals and patients. The Department of Veterans Affairs, which already has 18 facilities running long COVID programs, will serve as an incubator of ideas and strategies for dealing with the condition.
Finally, the administration said its plan will provide direct support for patients by safeguarding access to insurance coverage and extending the umbrella of civil rights protections to people with long COVID. In keeping with Biden’s focus on reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health care, part of the emphasis will be on minority communities that have borne a high toll from COVID-19.
Federal health programs, which can serve as a model for private insurance, will look for ways to make sure that treatments for long COVID are covered and paid for. “The administration is working to make long COVID care as accessible as possible,” said a White House overview of Biden’s plan.
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The COVID-19 outbreak in China’s largest metropolis of Shanghai remains “extremely grim” amid an ongoing lockdown confining around 26 million people to their homes, a city official said Tuesday.
Director of Shanghai’s working group on epidemic control, Gu Honghui, was quoted by state media as saying that the outbreak in the city was “still running at a high level.”
“The situation is extremely grim,” Gu said.
China has sent more than 10,000 health workers from around the country to aid the city, including 2,000 from the military, and is mass testing residents, some of whom have been locked down for weeks.
Most of eastern Shanghai, which was supposed to reopen last Friday, remained locked down along with the western half of the city.
Shanghai recorded another 13,354 cases on Monday — the vast majority of them asymptomatic — bringing the city’s total to more than 73,000 since the latest wave of infections began last month. No deaths have been ascribed to the outbreak driven by the omicron BA.2 variant, which is much more infectious but also less lethal than the previous delta strain.
A separate outbreak continues to rage in the northeastern province of Jilin and the capital Beijing also saw an additional nine cases, just one of them asymptomatic. Workers shut down an entire shopping center in the city where a case had been detected.
While China’s vaccination rate hovers around 90%, its domestically produced inactivated virus vaccines are seen as weaker than the mRNA vaccines such as those produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna that are used abroad, as well as in the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao. Vaccination rates among the elderly are also much lower than the population at large, with only around half of those over 80 fully vaccinated.
Meanwhile, complaints have arisen in Shanghai over difficulties obtaining food and daily necessities, and shortages of medical workers, volunteers and beds in isolation wards where tens of thousands are being kept for observation.
Shanghai has converted an exhibition hall and other facilities into massive isolation centers where people with mild or no symptoms are housed in a sea of beds separated by temporary partitions.
Public outrage has been fueled by reports and video clips posted on the internet documenting the death of a nurse who was denied admittance to her own hospital under COVID-19 restrictions, and infant children separated from their parents.
Circulation of footage showing multiple infants kept in cots prompted the city’s Public Health Clinical Center to issue a statement saying the children were being well looked after and had been in the process of being moved to a new facility when the footage was taken.
At a virtual town hall Monday, the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai warned of possible family separations amid the lockdown, but said it had an “extremely limited ability” to intervene in such cases.
Concern is growing about the potential economic impact on China’s financial capital, also a major shipping and manufacturing center. Most public transport has been suspended and non-essential businesses closed, although airports and train stations remain open and the city’s port and some major industries such as car plants continue to operate.
International events in the city have been canceled and three out of five foreign companies with operations in Shanghai say they have cut this year’s sales forecasts, according to a survey conducted last week by the American Chamber of Commerce. One-third of the 120 companies that responded to the survey said they have delayed investments.
Despite those concerns and growing public frustration, China says it is sticking to its hardline “zero-tolerance” approach mandating lockdowns, mass testing and the compulsory isolation of all suspected cases and close contacts.
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As Benito Luna-Herrera teaches his seventh-grade social studies classes, he is on alert for signs of inner turmoil. And there is so much of it these days.
One of his 12-year-old students felt her world was falling apart. Distance learning had upended her friendships. Things with her boyfriend were verging on violent. Her home life was stressful. “I’m just done with it,” the girl told Luna-Herrera during the pandemic, and shared a detailed plan to kill herself.
Another student was typically a big jokester and full of confidence. But one day she told him she didn’t want to live anymore. She, too, had a plan in place to end her life.
Luna-Herrera is just one teacher, in one Southern California middle school, but stories of students in distress are increasingly common around the country. The silver lining is that special training helped him know what to look for and how to respond when he saw the signs of a mental emergency.
Since the pandemic started, experts have warned of a mental health crisis facing American children. That is now playing out at schools in the form of increased childhood depression, anxiety, panic attacks, eating disorders, fights and thoughts of suicide at alarming levels, according to interviews with teachers, administrators, education officials and mental health experts.
In low-income areas, where adverse childhood experiences were high before the pandemic, the crisis is even more acute and compounded by a shortage of school staff and mental health professionals.
Luna-Herrera, who teaches in a high poverty area of the Mojave Desert, is among a small but growing number of California teachers to take a course called Youth Mental Health First Aid. It teaches adults how to spot warning signs of mental health risks and substance abuse in children, and how to prevent a tragedy.
The California Department of Education funds the program for any school district requesting it, and the pandemic has accelerated moves to make such courses a requirement. The training program is operated by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and available in every state.
“I don’t want to read about another teenager where there were warning signs and we looked the other way,” said Sen. Anthony Portantino, author of a bill that would require all California middle and high schools to train at least 75% of employees in behavioral health. “Teachers and school staff are on the front lines of a crisis, and need to be trained to spot students who are suffering.”
Experts say while childhood depression and anxiety had been on the rise for years, the pandemic’s unrelenting stress and grief amplified the problems, particularly for those already experiencing mental health issues who were cut off from counselors and other school resources during distance learning.
For children, the issues with distance learning were not just academic, said Sharon Hoover, professor of child psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health.
Child abuse and and neglect increased during the pandemic, according to Hoover. For children in troubled homes, with alcoholic or abusive parents, distance learning meant they had no escape. Those who lacked technology or had spotty internet connections were isolated even more than their peers and fell further behind academically and socially.
Many children bounced back after the extended isolation, but for others it will take longer, and mental health problems often lag a stressor.
“We can’t assume that ‘OK we’re back in school, it’s been a few months and now everyone should be back to normal.’ That is not the case,” said Hoover.
Returning to school after months of isolation intensified the anxiety for some children. Teachers say students have greater difficulty focusing, concentrating, sitting still and many need to relearn how to socialize and resolve conflicts face-to-face after prolonged immersion in screens.
Kids expected to pick up where they left off but some found friendships, and their ability to cope with social stress, had changed. Educators say they also see a concerning increase in apathy — about grades, how students treat each other and themselves — and a lot less empathy.
“I have never seen kids be so mean to each other in my life,” said Terrin Musbach, who trains teachers in mental health awareness and other social-emotional programs at the Del Norte Unified School District, a high-poverty district in rural Northern California. “There’s more school violence, there’s more vaping, there’s more substance abuse, there’s more sexual activity, there’s more suicide ideation, there’s more of every single behavior that we would be worried about in kids.”
Many states have mandated teacher training on suicide prevention over the last decade and the pandemic prompted some to broaden the scope to include mental health awareness and supporting behavioral health needs.
But school districts nationwide also say they need more psychologists and counselors. The Hopeful Futures Campaign, a coalition of national mental health organizations, last month published a report that found most states are struggling with mental health support in schools. Only Idaho and the District of Columbia exceed the nationally recommended ratio of one psychologist per 500 students.
In some states, including West Virginia, Missouri, Texas and Georgia, there is only one school psychologist for over 4,000 students, the report says. Similarly, few states meet the goal of one counselor per 250 students.
President Joe Biden has proposed $1 billion in new federal funding to help schools hire more counselors and psychologists and bolster suicide prevention programs. That followed a rare pubic advisory in December from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on “the urgent need to address the nation’s youth mental health crisis.”
In early 2021, emergency room visits in the U.S. for suspected suicide attempts were 51% higher for adolescent girls and 4% higher for adolescent boys compared to the same period in 2019, according to research cited in the advisory.
Since California began offering the Youth Mental Health First Aid course in 2014, more than 8,000 teachers, administrators and school staff have been trained, said Monica Nepomuceno, who oversees mental health programming at the California Department of Education.
She said much more needs to be done in the country’s largest state, which employs over 600,000 K-12 staff at schools.
The course helps distinguish typical adolescent ways of dealing with stress — slamming doors, crying, bursts of anger — from warning signs of mental distress, which can be blatant or subtle.
Red flags include when a child talks about dying or suicide, but can be more nuanced like: “I can’t do this anymore,” or “I’m tired of this,” said Tramaine El-Amin, a spokesperson for the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. More than 550,000 K-12 educators across the country have taken the Youth Mental Health First Aid course since it launched in 2012, she said.
Changes in behavior could be cause for concern — a child who stops a sport or activity they were passionate about without replacing it with another one; a typically put together child who starts to look regularly unkempt; a student whose grades plummet or who stops handing in homework; a child who eats lunch alone and has stopped palling around with their friends.
After noticing something might be wrong, the course teaches the next step is to ask the student without pressuring or casting judgment and letting them know you care and want to help.
“Sometimes an adult can ask a question that causes more harm than good,” said Luna-Herrera, the social studies teacher at California City Middle School, a two-hour drive into the desert from Los Angeles.
He took the course in spring 2021 and two weeks later put it to use. It was during distance learning and a student had failed to show up for online tutoring but he spotted her chatting online on the school’s distance learning platform, having a heated dispute with her then-boyfriend. Luna reached out to her privately.
“I asked her if she was OK,” he said. Little by little, the girl told Luna-Herrera about problems with friends and her boyfriend and problems at home that left her feeling alone and desperately unanchored.
The course tells adults to ask open-ended questions that keep the conversation going, and not to project themselves into an adolescent’s problems with comments like: “You’ll be fine; It’s not that bad; I went through that; Try to ignore it.” What might seem trivial to an adult can feel overwhelming for a young person, and failure to recognize that can be a conversation stopper.
The 12-year old told Luna-Herrera she had considered hurting herself. “Is that a recurring thought?” he asked, recalling how his heart started racing as she revealed her suicide plan.
Like CPR first-aid training, the course teaches how to handle a crisis: Raise the alarm and get expert help. Do not leave a person contemplating suicide alone. As Luna-Herrera continued talking to the girl, he texted his school superintendent, who got the principal on the line, they called 911 and police rushed to the home, where they spoke to the girl and her mother, who was startled and unaware.
“He absolutely saved that child’s life,” said Mojave Unified Superintendent Katherine Aguirre, who oversees the district of about 3,000 students, the majority of whom are Latino and Black children from economically disadvantaged families.
Aguirre recognized the need for behavioral heath training early in the pandemic and through the Department of Education trained all of her employees, from teachers to yard supervisors and cafeteria workers.
“It’s about awareness. And that Sandy Hook promise: If you see something, say something,” she said.
That did not happen with 14-year-old Taya Bruell.
Taya was a bright, precocious student who had started struggling with mental health issues at about 11, according to her father, Harry Bruell. At the time, the family lived in Boulder, Colorado where Taya was hospitalized at one point for psychiatric care but kept up the trappings of a model student: She got straight As, was co-leader of her high school writing club and in her spare time taught senior citizens to use computers.
For a literature class, Taya was assigned to keep a journal. In it, she drew a disturbing portrait that showed self-harm and wrote about how much she hated her body and was hearing voices she wanted to silence.
Her teacher read the assignment and wrote: “Taya, very thorough journal. I loved reading the entries. A+”
Three months later in February 2016, Taya killed herself. After her death, Taya’s parents discovered the journal in her room and brought it to the school, where they learned Taya’s teacher had not informed the school counselor or administrators of what she had seen. They don’t blame the teacher but will always wonder what if she had not ignored the signs of danger.
“I don’t think the teacher wanted to hurt our daughter. I think she had no idea what to do when she read those stark warning signs in Taya’s journal,” said her father, who has since relocated with the family to Santa Barbara, California.
He believes legislation to require teacher training in behavioral health will save lives. “It teaches you to raise the alarm, and not just walk away, which is what happened to Taya.”
WKMG News 6 & ClickOrlando
Bipartisan Senate bargainers have agreed to a slimmed-down $10 billion package for countering COVID-19, but without any funds to help nations abroad combat the pandemic, Democrats and Republicans familiar with the talks said Monday.
At least half the measure would have to be used to research and produce therapeutics to treat the disease, according to a fact sheet distributed by the chief GOP bargainer, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. And at least $750 million would be used to research new COVID-19 variants and to expand vaccine production, the description said.
The agreement comes with party leaders hoping to move the legislation through Congress this week, before lawmakers leave for a two-week spring recess. It also comes with BA.2, the new omicron variant, expected to spark a fresh increase in U.S. cases. Around 980,000 Americans and over 6 million people worldwide have died from COVID-19.
The accord represents a deep cut from the $22.5 billion President Joe Biden initially requested, and from a $15 billion version that both parties’ leaders had negotiated last month. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., abandoned that plan after Democratic lawmakers rejected proposed cuts in state pandemic aid to help pay for the package.
The $15 billion plan had included about $5 billion for the global effort to fight COVID-19, which has run rampant in many countries, especially poorer ones. The overall price tag has shrunk, and the global money has fallen off, as the two parties have been unable to agree on more than $10 billion in budget savings to pay for it.
Some people said the fate of the new agreement remained uncertain in the House, where Pelosi and liberal Democrats have expressed opposition to dropping the money for helping other countries.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, leader of the House Progressive Caucus, said erasing the global assistance from the package “is a big problem,” and said she and other supporters of helping other countries have voiced their objections to House leadership and Senate negotiators. “It’s really shortsighted to not spend money on making sure this virus is contained around the world,” Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat who worked in global public health for a decade, told reporters.
The two Democrats and three Republicans who described the accord did so on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the talks publicly.
One of the Democrats, and a third member of that party, said it remained unclear whether the emerging package would attract the minimum 10 GOP votes needed for the measure to move through the 50-50 Senate. The others said the needed Republican votes would be there.
The measure is fully paid for by pulling back unspent funds from previous pandemic relief bills that have been enacted, bargainers have said.
Romney’s fact sheet says those savings include $2.3 billion from a fund protecting aviation manufacturing jobs; $1.9 billion from money for helping entertainment venues shuttered by the pandemic; another $1.9 billion from a program that helps states extend credit to small businesses; and $1.6 billion from agriculture assistance programs.
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AP writer Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.