Rising COVID-19 cases are driving up the use of therapeutics, with Pfizer Inc.’s oral antiviral treatment Paxlovid seeing a 315 percent jump over the past four weeks, U.S. health officials said on May 17.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries believes the company would have to pay around $2.6 billion in cash and medicine to settle thousands of lawsuits alleging the world’s largest generic firm and other drug manufacturers fueled the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic was reflected in a natural decrease during 2021 in the population of nearly three-quarters of U.S. counties versus the two previous years, the census bureau said on March 24.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and AbbVie will pay the state of Rhode Island a combined $28.5 million to settle opioid-related claims against the companies.
The BA.2 sub-variant of Omicron was estimated to be 23.1 percent of the coronavirus variants circulating in the United States as of March 12, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on March 15.
Rhode Island was set to square off on March 14 against Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., as a multibillion-dollar trial begins over whether the Israeli company contributed to an opioid crisis that has caused more than 500,000 deaths over the past two decades.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on February 17 that the FTC would file a lawsuit aimed at stopping the merger of Rhode Island’s two largest health care providers, Lifespan Corp. and Care New England Health System.
President Joe Biden said on Jan. 27 that 14.5 million Americans have signed up for health insurance since Nov. 1, attributing the progress to the passage of his pandemic relief package and the re-opening of an online health insurance marketplace during 2021.
Rhode Island on Jan. 25 reversed course and threw the state’s support behind a $21 billion nationwide settlement it originally declined to back resolving lawsuits alleging that three large drug distributors fueled the deadly U.S. opioid epidemic.
New cases of Covid-19 in the United States fell 0.4 percent during the week ended April 18 after rising for four weeks in a row, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.
