Day: June 29, 2020

India has banned the use of 59 Chinese-owned apps, including TikTok, citing security concerns Monday, as relations between the two neighbors worsen. In a statement, India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT said it “has decided to block 59 apps since in view of information available, they are engaged in activities which is prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order.” TikTok, a popular video application owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, counts India as its biggest market. It was not immediately clear how the “ban” would be enforced and whether mobile companies were expected to comply. As of Monday evening, the banned apps were still available on Google’s Play store and the Apple App store in India, according to Tech Crunch.The announcement from Delhi comes amid rising tension between the two countries, weeks after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in clashes with Chinese forces along the border in the region of Ladakh. The Chinese government did not release figures on how many of its own soldiers were injured or killed. 
 
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed abortion-rights advocates a victory, striking down a restrictive abortion law in Louisiana that would have left the southern state with only one abortion clinic.The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s four-member liberal contingent. The decision struck down a law that would have required doctors performing abortions to gain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, even though abortion-rights activists say patients rarely need to be hospitalized after the procedure.The White House deplored the ruling. Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said it “devalued both the health of mothers and lives of unborn children. Instead of valuing fundamental democratic principles, unelected justices have intruded on the sovereign prerogatives of state governments by imposing their own policy preference in favor of abortion to override legitimate abortion safety regulations.”  In their first abortion case rulings, conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s appointments, were in the minority, voting to uphold the Louisiana law that would have overturned a 2016 ruling by a different group of court justices that struck down an almost identical restrictive abortion law in Texas.In concurring with the court’s liberal wing, Roberts said respect for court precedent in previous decisions “requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike. The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore, Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”Roberts’s alignment with the court’s four liberals was striking because he declared that he continues to believe that the 2016 Texas case was “wrongly decided,” but that it nonetheless should be adhered to in the Louisiana case. The decision was a significant win for U.S. abortion-rights advocates and a setback for abortion foes who had hoped that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would lead the court to impose more abortion restrictions and eventually overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing abortion rights in the U.S.Abortion-rights advocates contended that the Louisiana law was a veiled attempt to chip away at the legality of abortion in the U.S. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the majority “consequently hold that the Louisiana statute is unconstitutional.” He said the evidence in the Louisiana dispute “also shows that opposition to abortion played a significant role in some hospitals’ decisions to deny admitting privileges” to abortion practitioners.Health experts estimate that more than 800,000 abortions a year are performed in the U.S., although the figure is down substantially from the 1978 to 1997 period when the annual figures topped a million abortions and peaked at more than 1.4 million.The question before the court in Monday’s ruling was whether Louisiana’s 2014 law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals would unduly burden women seeking an abortion.Abortion practitioners have said it had been all but impossible for a variety of reasons for them to obtain hospital admitting privileges, which would have left Louisiana with a single abortion clinic, in the state’s biggest city, New Orleans.However, the law’s supporters said it would protect the health and safety of women seeking abortions and would help ensure the competence of doctors.But abortion-rights supporters cited the rarity of the need for hospitalization after an abortion and said women could, if needed, be hospitalized whether their abortion practitioner had admitting privileges or not.The Texas law struck down in 2016 said the admitting privilege provision did not have a medical benefit.In that decision, now-retired justice Anthony Kennedy joined the court’s four liberals to form a majority. At that time before Trump assumed the presidency, the Department of Justice argued that the Texas law should be struck down. But under Trump, the department backed the Louisiana law.The court’s 2016 decision said the admitting-privileges requirement “provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so.”
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The maker of a drug shown to shorten recovery time for severely ill COVID-19 patients says it will charge $2,340 for a typical treatment course for people covered by government health programs in the United States and other developed countries.
Gilead Sciences announced the price Monday for remdesivir, and said the price would be $3,120 for patients with private insurance. The amount that patients pay out of pocket depends on insurance, income and other factors.
“We’re in uncharted territory with pricing a new medicine, a novel medicine, in a pandemic,” Gilead’s chief executive, Dan O’Day, told The Associated Press.
“We believe that we had to really deviate from the normal circumstances” and price the drug to ensure wide access rather than based solely on value to patients, he said.
However, the price was swiftly criticized; a consumer group called it “an outrage” because of the amount taxpayers invested toward the drug’s development.  
The treatment courses that the company has donated to the U.S. and other countries will run out in about a week, and the prices will apply to the drug after that, O’Day said.  
In the U.S., federal health officials have allocated the limited supply to states, but that agreement with Gilead will end after September. They said Monday that the government has secured more than 500,000 additional courses that Gilead will produce starting in July to supply to hospitals through September, and stressed that that does not mean the government actually was acquiring that much, just ensuring the availability.
“We should have sufficient supply … but we have to make sure it’s in the right place at the right time,” O’Day said  
In 127 poor or middle-income countries, Gilead is allowing generic makers to supply the drug; two countries are doing that for around $600 per treatment course.
Remdesivir’s price has been highly anticipated since it became the first medicine to show benefit in the pandemic, which has killed more than half a million people globally in six months.  
The drug interferes with the coronavirus’s ability to copy its genetic material. In a U.S.
government-led study,  remdesivir shortened recovery time by 31% — 11 days on average versus 15 days for those given just usual care. It had not improved survival according to preliminary results after two weeks of followup; results after four weeks are expected soon.
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, a nonprofit group that analyzes drug prices, said remdesivir would be cost-effective in a range of $4,580 to $5,080 if it saved lives. But recent news that a cheap steroid called dexamethasone improves survival means remdesivir should be priced between $2,520 and $2,800, the group said.  
“This is a high price for a drug that has not been shown to reduce mortality,” Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic said in an email. “Given the serious nature of the pandemic, I would prefer that the government take over production and distribute the drug for free. It was developed using significant taxpayer funding.”  
Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”
“Remdesivir should be in the public domain” because the drug received at least $70 million in public funding toward its development, he said.  
“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”  
While it may be a sticker shock for many, “from the health system perspective, if remdesivir can shorten duration of hospitalization by four days, then the medicine provides a reasonable value,” Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, said in an email.  
O’Day said that shortening hospitalization saves about $12,000 per patient. Gilead says it will have spent $1 billion on developing and making the drug by the end of this year.  
The drug has emergency use authorization in the U.S. and Gilead has applied for full approval.
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Wanda Johnson’s son was shot and killed by a police officer in Oakland, California, 11 years ago, she has watched video after video of similar encounters between Black people and police.  Each time, she finds herself reliving the trauma of losing her son, Oscar Grant, who was shot to death by a transit police officer. Most recently, Johnson couldn’t escape the video of George Floyd, pinned to the ground under a Minneapolis officer’s knee as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe.  “I began to shake. I was up for two days, just crying,” she said. “Just looking at that video opened such a wound in me that has not completely closed.”  Johnson’s loss was extreme, but, for many Black Americans, her grief and pain feels familiar. Psychologists call it racial trauma — the distress experienced because of the accumulation of racial discrimination, racial violence or institutional racism. While it can affect anyone who faces repeated prejudice, in this moment, its impact on Black people is drawing particular attention.  The unfortunate irony is that the very tool that may be helping to make more people aware of the racism and violence that Black and other people of color face is also helping to fuel their trauma. In the weeks following Floyd’s death, the spread of the video that captured it has been a major catalyst for protests demanding a reckoning with racism — attended by people of all races, many of whom never before participated in such activism. And in a few weeks, the national conversation has shifted dramatically: The term “Black Lives Matter” has been adopted widely, including in corporate America, monuments of Confederate figures have come down, and calls for criminal justice reform have yielded new laws.  “It’s really frustrating that that’s what it takes for a lot of people in this country to actually start caring,” said Alasia Destine-DeFreece, 20. “It takes showing something that’s  actively harming those of us who are Black and then having it spread on social media.”  Destine-DeFreece, who remembers often being the only Black person in many situations growing up in Rhode Island, notes that such images have been used to great effect before. She learned in school about Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was abducted, beaten and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Her class saw photos of Till’s brutally beaten face — images, in part, that had helped spur the civil rights movement. “Seeing that type of imagery being spread further and faster now has taken a toll on me. You’re seeing somebody who looks like you die,” she said. Symptoms of racial trauma can include anxiety and depression and be similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. The triggering event could be a shouted slur on the street or poor treatment because of one’s race or creed. The profusion on social media of graphic images of harm to people of color means they are often inescapable. “If you are in a situation where the danger seems ever-present, whether you’re seeing a bird watcher in Central Park being harassed, or someone falling asleep in their car in a parking lot … there is that constant physical presence of danger and the psychological awareness that danger is just around the corner,” said Dr. Altha Stewart, past president of the American Psychiatric Association and currently a senior associate dean at the University of Tennessee Science Health Center. That “constant bathing of our organs” in stress hormones can lead to a state of “near dysfunction,” she said. The video of Floyd’s killing is one in a litany. Before it, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery’s fatal shooting was also captured on camera, and no one was charged until public pressure mounted after the video made the rounds. Since then, many have watched an officer fatally shoot 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks in the back following a struggle.  “It feels like it’s just been an endless cascade of hashtags of Black people dying,” said Christine Ohenzuwa, 19, who recently protested outside the Minnesota state Capitol. “I feel like for me and a lot of other Black people, it reaches a point where it’s just very traumatic to constantly see Black people being killed.” When video of Floyd’s graphic death began to circulate online last month, Joi Lewis refused to watch it. “I know what it looks like. I’ve seen Black death,” the life coach and self-care expert said. Lewis, who is Black, had watched the death of Philando Castile in real time four years ago, after the 32-year-old Black man was shot by a Minneapolis police officer and video of the immediate aftermath streamed on Facebook. But to inspire those who have been pushed into action in new ways in recent weeks, Lewis conceded: “The video had to be played.” Anyone might be upset by seeing such graphic images — and many are — but Resmaa Menakem, a Minneapolis-based racial trauma specialist, says, for many Black people, that pain is amplified.  “When something like this happens, it is not just the grief of watching that brother be destroyed, it is the 400 years of grief that was never addressed,” said Menakem. Aaron Requena periodically takes breaks from Twitter to avoid such images. The 25-year-old photographer in Los Angeles says he’s struggled to balance keeping up with what is happening with not torturing himself at the same time.  “It hits close to home for me because I’ve had interactions with the police where I was just minding my business and had to wonder, ‘Is this going to end for me the way that a lot of these situations end?’” asked Requena, who is Black. “It hits close to home because you know that it could be you next.”  
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