Coronavirus Daily News Brief – April 1: Supreme Court Denies Job Dismissal Appeal for Vaccine Refusal, More Vaccine Side-Effects Reported in Republican States

Managing the pandemic has been as crazy as balancing a yellow taxi on the tip of a Dalmatian’s snout.
Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,482nd day and the first day of April. The day is known as April Fools’ Day, Aprilscherz in German, April vis in Dutch, poisson d’avril in French, and pesce d’aprile in Italian. The day is international in scope and millions of people the world over cannot seem to resist playing a harmless prank on their friends and neighbors.
In news we cover today, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the appeal of a woman who contested her dismissal from a job because she refused to get inoculated, a new study found that a higher percentage of Republican voters had reported adverse side effects from coronavirus vaccines than voters who were Democrats, and we look at the question of nutritional targeting as a treatment for Long Covid.
TODAY IN COVID HISTORY
On April 1, 2020, there were few if any April Fools’ news reports relating to the pandemic. But there was some good news: Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus pandemic coordinator, said at a press briefing that a coronavirus antibody test could be available “within this month.”
Then President Trump attributed his shift in tone about the “severity” of Covid to the case of an unnamed friend whom he had previously mentioned but who had slipped into a coma.
“I think also, and looking at the way –  the contagion –  it is so contagious,” Trump said at the daily White House pandemic briefing. “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this, where large groups of people all of a sudden, just by being in the presence of somebody, have it.”
Finally, the United States saw a record number of deaths on the first, 917, which brought the total pandemic death count in the country to at least 4,745.
THE LEDE
Could Nutritional Targeting of Mitochondrial Metabolism Serve as an Effective Treatment Regimen for Long Covid
In the Center for Long Covid Research’s weekly research meeting, in which among other things we typically discuss newly published studies in the space.
This week, as covered in the Brief yesterday, a new study published in the journal npj Science of Food, suggests multiple nutritional strategies such as nutritional targeting of mitochondrial metabolism that could serve as an effective treatment regimen in Long Covid patients.
Dr. Ellen Martin and I agreed on virtually every point but her words were more descriptive so I present them here for the benefit of our readers.
She made the following points:
“Articles this long that start by boiling the ocean of possible causes for PACS to focus on those where nutrient intervention may be helpful always raise my skepticism precisely because they pile in everything including the kitchen sink. So by the time the reader gets to the interventions, they may be convinced by sheer nagging.
“The mitochondrial hypothesis is very popular now but has a long history of popularity in the functional medicine community. It’s usually arm-waving, because we have no good ways to test intracellular mitochondrial function yet, despite claims of such. So how we would determine if an individual patient has mitochondrial insufficiency in order to address it with food is unclear.
“Likewise, the evidence base for specific nutrients (leaving aside deficiencies) to fix these issues is very slim.
“I suspect the new coverage has turned this into a miracle cure story, when that’s not what the article itself is about.
In addition, this begs the question how does one determine which nutrients are given to whom and when and in what quantity.  Not everything is as simple as prescribing Vitamin B-12 in instances where lab results indicate it is appropriate.
My take is this: Over the past 18 months we’ve seen signs of great progress with respect to addressing the condition but what we don’t know could fill libraries, and the cost of our not understanding is great: Not only is Long Covid a huge new and somewhat incomprehensible burden on the health-care system, but it reduces many patients with the condition to a shadow of their former selves.
LONG COVID
A new study describes several bioactive nutritional interventions that could reset virus-induced human metabolic reprogramming and dysregulation in Long Covid patients.
The study, which was published on Saturday in the journal npj Science of Food and led by A Satyanarayan Naidu , the Director of N-terminus Research Laboratory in California, suggests multiple nutritional strategies such as nutritional targeting of mitochondrial metabolism that could serve as an effective treatment regimen in Long Covid patients.
“We have described a few evidence-based, human RCT tested, bioactive nutritional interventions for resetting of virus-induced HMRD in PASC through precision nutrition,” the study’s authors wrote.
UNITED STATES
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the appeal of a Minnesota woman who said that she was wrongly denied unemployment benefits after she had been fired from her job for refusing to be inoculated against the coronavirus. The woman had cited her religious beliefs in her appeal.
The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development had determined that she wasn’t eligible for benefits because her grounds for refusing the jab were based more on a lack of trust that the vaccine would prove effective than on religious beliefs.
A new study found that states with a higher percentage of Republican voters had reported more instances ofadverse side effects from coronavirus vaccines than did their counterparts in the Democratic Party.  The study, entitled “Reports of Covid-19 Vaccine Adverse Events in Predominantly Republican vs Democratic States” and published in the JAMA medical journal, examined 620,456 vaccine adverse events reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System  from adults 18 and older.
The University of Pennsylvania-based researchers separately looked for three outcomes: rates of adverse events among vaccine recipients, rates of any severe adverse effects among this group and the proportion of adverse events reported as severe.
In July of 2023, a cohort study conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health that evaluated 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was found to be significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after coronavirusvaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
GLOBAL STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Monday, April 1.
As of Monday, at press time, the world has recorded 704.54 million Covid-19 cases, a figure that is largely unchanged in the last 24 hours, and 7.01 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 675.4 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.01 million in the same period.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls as well as the occasional downward or upward adjustment as corrections to case figures warrant.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Monday at press time is  22,130,484, a decrease of 3,000 in the past 48 hours. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 22,095,528, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 34,956, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past 19 months.
Since the start of the pandemic, the United States has, as of Monday, recorded 111.77 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.22 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 45.03 million, and the world’s fourth highest death toll, 533,547.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July 2022, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States.  Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with 40.14 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.83 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 710,966, has recorded 38.69 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are South Korea, with 34.57 million cases, as number six; Japan, with 33.8 million cases placing it in the number seven slot; and Italy, with 26.72 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.91 million, and Russia, with 24.91 million, as nine and ten respectively.
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending March 16, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on March 22 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 4.0%, and the trend in test positivity is -0.6% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 0.6%, and the trend in emergency department visits is -21.1%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 in the same 7-day period was 9,345, a figure that is down 13.9% over the past 7-day period. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 1.5%, a figure that is down 16.7% in the same period.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Monday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.57 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 8,948 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.7% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, 2023, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number.
Finally, as of March 31, 2024 , only the following countries and territories have not reported any cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections whatsoever:
Antarctica
British Antarctic Territory
Peter Island
Overseas
Bouvet Island
Heard Island and McDonald Islands
Prince Edward Islands
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
If you have Long Covid and need to talk to someone, call the Long Covid Patient Peer Counseling Phone Line, or HOPELINE.  The HOPELINE is our free, confidential support and information service.
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