Top U.S. health officials on March 2 laid out a national blueprint to manage COVID-19 going forward, vowing to prepare for any new variant outbreaks without shutting down schools and businesses and calling for additional funding from Congress.
Black women in the United States were nearly three times as likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic than white women, according to a government report published on February 23.
At least $18 billion is needed to get the fight against malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS back on track from disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a global health fund said on February 23.
U.S. health regulators are looking at authorizing a potential fourth dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in the fall, the Wall Street Journal reported on February 19, citing sources familiar with the matter.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS), three more deaths have been reported potentially associated with the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm since Biogen indicated during November 2021 that the company was investigating the death of a 75-year-old woman who died from a brain abnormality.
With the Omicron surge waning – at least in the United States – there is speculation that the COVID-19 pandemic may be in its end stages, although some experts warn that this could be premature.
Global COVID-19 cases surpassed 400 million on February 9, according to a Reuters tally, as the highly contagious Omicron variant dominates the outbreak, pushing health systems in several countries to the brink of capacity.
The coronavirus pandemic reached a grim new milestone in the United States on Feb. 4 with the nation’s cumulative death toll from COVID-19 surpassing 900,000, even as the daily number of lives lost began to level off, according to data collected by Reuters.
President Joe Biden on Feb. 2 announced plans to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over the next 25 years, part of an effort to revive the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative to speed research and make more treatments available.
A federal judge on Feb. 1 extended a legal shield protecting the Sackler family owners of Purdue Pharma from lawsuits to Feb. 17, as they try to reach a deal with several states to settle sprawling litigation stemming from the U.S. opioid crisis.
