A sign at a former coronavirus testing site in New York City
Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,128th day of the pandemic and the last day of Passover, the holiday that marks the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
The saga over mifepristone, a key abortion medication that is also used to treat other conditions such as in the management and treatment of Cushing’s syndrome and uterine leiomyomas, continues.
In what many (including myself) see as a textbook example of judicial overreach, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk last Friday revoked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which dates back to 2000. His move, which has now been placed on hold by an appeals court albeit with restrictions, poses a threat to the U.S. government’s regulatory authority over pharmaceuticals that could go well beyond that pill.
His ruling – in what many confused for a development on a reality television program – was followed by a separate and unrelated ruling by another judge, Thomas O. Rice of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, who issued an injunction ordering the FDA not to limit the drug’s availability in a case where attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia had challenged extra restrictions that the FDA imposes on mifepristone.
Some background: A bill signed into law in 1938, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, gave the FDA overarching authority to determine whether a drug is safe and effective. Without such approval, the drug cannot be legally sold in the country. In order to gain such approval, pharmaceutical houses must conduct a series of animal studies as well as human clinical trials that can go on for years and cost millions of dollars with an eye towards proving to the FDA that a new drug can be a safe and effective treatment for a disease or medical condition.
Meanwhile, the order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit maintains mifepristone’s availability for now, although it temporarily prevents the drug from being mailed to patients. It also rolls back the Food and Drug Administration’s loosening of other regulations in 2016 that were intended to expand access to the pill.
The normally conservative 5th Circuit said it would not allow Kacsmaryk’s entire order to go into effect because conservative groups waited too many years to challenge the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug, which took place 23 years ago in 2000 However, the court said, the statute of limitations had not lapsed for them to challenge the FDA’s 2016 regulatory changes.
Legal scholars believe that Kacsmaryk’s ruling could, were it to be upheld, spur disputes over multiple pharmaceuticals and could even upend the drug industry’s reliance on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“If this ruling were to stand, then there will be virtually no prescription, approved by the F.D.A., that would be safe from these kinds of political, ideological attacks,” President Biden said in a statement on Friday night following news over the Texas decision.
In other news we cover today, the XBB.1.16 recombinant subvariant is spreading in the United States, public testing is ending for most people in the United States, and various types of books about the pandemic are about to flood the market.
UNITED STATES
An omicron subvariant, XBB.1.16, which the World Health Organization earlier in the month called “one to watch,” has now been detected in 27 states including New York, where it was first identified.
The sublineage is driving a surge of new cases in India, at a time where reported cases are in decline throughout the rest of the world.
XBB.1.16 is viewed as likely to be problematic because it is a recombinant of BA.2.10.1 and BA2.75. Few recombinant subvariants have propagated in the wild so little is known about how they impact patients who become infected with them.
Meanwhile, free coronavirus testing is ending for many Americans with the expiration of the federal coronavirus public health emergency next month. Free testing is one of the basic tools necessary to navigate the pandemic and, while at-home tests will be available for purchase online and at pharmacies, only a handful of states and municipalities plan to mandate that insurers foot the bill for the tests.
Medicare, which covers most senior citizens, will no longer cover testing but Medicaid, a government health program for those with limited incomes, will continue to cover testing through September 2024.
It is important to note that the U.S. Postal Service will continue to offer test kits to households that have not yet received two shipments and many local and community agencies across the country may offer them as well.
In California, Senate Bill 510 requires that health insurance companies continue to cover the costs of coronavirus testing, including in the workplace, after the public health emergency lapses.
GLOBAL
As SARS-CoV-2 slowly moves to an endemic state, there will likely be a flood of pandemic novels, histories, alternate histories, memoirs, and art. One such piece is Clare Fuller’s The Memory of Animals, which looks at a world devastated by a global pandemic of dropsy and several volunteers in a vaccine trial emerge after several weeks in isolation to find a world completely devastated and transformed.
TODAY’S STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Thursday, April 13.
As of Thursday morning, the world has recorded 685.3 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.1 million from the previous day, and 6.84 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 658.1 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of 0.1 million from the previous day.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Thursday at press time is 20,392,268, an increase of 39,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 20,352,663 are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 39,605, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past five months.
The United States reported 120,530 new cases in the period March 30 through April 5, a figure that is down 23% over the same period one week earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death toll for the same period is 1,773, a figure that is down 22%. The average number of hospital admissions from Covid was 5,396 on April 10, a figure that is down 8% over the preceding 14 days. Finally, the test positivity rate is 6.4%, down 6% over the 14 days preceding April 7.
Starting on March 25, 2023, the Morning News Brief began to update case data as well as death tolls on a weekly basis.
In addition, since the start of the pandemic the United States has, as of Thursday, recorded 106.4 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of just under 1.16 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, 44.7 million, and a reported death toll of 531,035.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July, 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 over 39.8 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.4 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 700,811, has recorded over 37.3 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are Japan, with just under 33.6 million cases, South Korea, with just under 31 million cases, placing it in the number seven slot, and Italy, with 25.7 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.4 million, and Russia, with 22.7 million.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, as of the past Thursday, over 270 million people in the United States – or 81.3% – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Of that population, 69.4%, or 230.4 million people, have received two doses of vaccine, and the total number of doses that have been dispensed in the United States is now 674.4 million. Breaking this down further, 92.2% of the population over the age of 18 – or 238.2 million people – has received at least a first inoculation and 79.1% of the same group – or 204.2 million people – is fully vaccinated. In addition, 20.1 of the same population, or 52 million people, has already received an updated or bivalent booster dose of vaccine, while 23.3 million people over the age of 65, or 42.4% of that population have also received the bivalent booster.
Starting on June 13, 2022, the CDC began to update vaccine data on a weekly basis and publish the updated information on Thursdays by 8 p.m. EDT, a statement on the agency’s website said.
Some 69.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Thursday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.37 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 205,302 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 29.2% 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 start of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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