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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a call for “urgent action” recommending those who are pregnant get vaccinated against the coronavirus. The health body said immunization rates among that population lagged as covid-linked deaths among pregnant people reach their highest levels yet during the pandemic. In a health advisory released Wednesday, the CDC said it recommends coronavirus vaccines “before or during pregnancy because the benefits of vaccination outweigh known or potential risks.” It said its advice applies to “people who are pregnant, recently pregnant … who are trying to become pregnant now, or who might become pregnant in the future.” (Pietsch and Suliman, 9/30)

The CDC issued "an urgent health advisory" on Wednesday urging people who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The CDC said it "strongly recommends" vaccination because its benefits for a pregnant person and the fetus outweigh the risks. It added that pregnant people with COVID-19 are at "increased risk" of outcomes such as preterm birth, stillbirth and admission of a newborn into the ICU. (Gonzalez, 9/29)

Mississippi already has a higher-than-average prematurity rate, around 14%, however, it's too soon to know the impact COVID-19 may have on that rate. Since the virus came into the Magnolia State in March 2020, the Mississippi State Department of Health has reported more than 1,600 COVID-19 cases, 116 hospitalizations and 15 coronavirus-related deaths in expecting mothers. One infant that was less than 1 year old, has died in the state, though, it is not known whether the child was a newborn. The University of Mississippi Medical Center and Forrest General Hospital have cared for expecting mothers with COVID-19 who delivered their babies preterm because the mothers were acutely ill from the virus. (Haselhorst, 9/29)

Federal investigators charged two metro Detroiters on Wednesday in schemes to sell phony COVID-19 vaccine cards. Bethann Kierczak, a 37-year-old registered nurse from Southgate, allegedly stole vaccination record cards from the John D. Dingell VA Medical Center in Detroit starting in May and sold them for $100-$200 apiece, primarily using the Facebook Messenger app, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit. In a separate case, Rapheal Jarrell Smiley, 32, of Detroit, is accused of importing fake COVID-19 vaccine record cards from China and selling them using his Facebook and Instagram accounts. (Jordan Shamus, 9/29)

The co-founder and chief medical officer of BioNTech, the German firm which developed a Covid-19 vaccine alongside Pfizer, told CNBC that the world “should not live in fear” of the virus. “Covid will become manageable. It already has started to become manageable” Dr. Ozlem Tureci said in the latest episode of “The CNBC Conversation.”  However, she added that we will “need to go back to a new normality, because this virus will accompany us for, still, some years.” (Bryer, 9/30)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is leaning toward authorizing half-dose booster shots of the Moderna Inc. coronavirus vaccine, satisfied that it’s effective in shoring up protection, people familiar with the matter said. The authorization would set the stage to further widen the U.S. booster campaign after earlier authorization of the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE shot. About 170 million fully vaccinated people in the U.S. received the Moderna or Pfizer shots, or 92% of the total inoculated so far. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity, before a potential announcement. It’s not clear when an announcement will come. (Wingrove and Jacobs, 9/29)

Moderna's current vaccine shot is a 100-microgram dose, compared with Pfizer's 30-microgram dose. Cutting the Moderna doses in half could help reduce the risks of side effects from the booster. It would provide more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to help more people get the booster when it's their turn. Also, Moderna has been shown to be more effective than Pfizer at preventing hospitalizations, so the FDA believes a half dose could be effective in keeping protection intact, according to reports. (Colby, 9/29)

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that safety and efficacy data on pairing a primary regimen of Covid vaccines from one manufacturer with boosters from another could be available within the next two weeks. Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorized Pfizer’s booster for seniors and the medically vulnerable Friday, only recipients of Pfizer’s first two doses are eligible for the third shot. But the National Institutes of Health is on the verge of concluding trials that mixed boosters and initial doses from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, Fauci said at a White House Covid briefing. (Towey, 9/28)

Debbie Hirsch, a 67-year-old retired special-education teacher who received the Moderna vaccine initially, wasn’t going to wait; she made an appointment on Monday at her local CVS Health Corp. pharmacy in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. A nurse there gave her a third Moderna shot, no questions asked, she said. Ms. Hirsch, whose husband is recovering from heart surgery, said she checked a box on the CVS website attesting that she was immunocompromised, even though she doesn’t qualify. FDA guidelines for patients receiving a third Moderna jab include patients who take medication to suppress their immune systems and cancer patients currently undergoing treatment. (Whelan, 9/29)

Allie French, of Omaha, Nebraska, said the move toward booster shots only reinforced her strong belief that vaccinations aren’t necessary, particularly for people who take care of themselves. “It comes back to a mindset of not needing your hand held through every situation,” said French, founder of a small advocacy group called Nebraskans Against Government Overreach. Tara Dukart, a 40-year-old rancher from Hazen, North Dakota, and a board member for Health Freedom North Dakota, an organization that has fought mask and vaccine mandates, said: “I think that there is a tremendous amount of hesitancy because why get a third shot if the first two shots didn’t work?” (Stobbe, 9/29)

The city of Detroit and other county health departments in metro Detroit are offering Pfizer COVID-19 booster shots to eligible populations days after the boosters were approved by federal regulators. And officials are urging those eligible for a booster, or those age 12 and older who have not been vaccinated, to get inoculated as cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to rise — mostly among the unvaccinated — and the highly-contagious delta variant circulates in the region, state and across the nation. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said Wednesday the virus has spread greatly during the last two months, including to the Midwest and Michigan. (Hall, 9/29)

Gov. Mike Parson and his wife, Teresa, are planning to get a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Parson, 66, is urging Missourians to get a booster now that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has approved a third shot of the Pfizer vaccine for seniors, people with underlying medical conditions and people aged 18-64 years old who are at increased risk for being exposed to the respiratory virus. “Governor Parson supports the booster shot for those who qualify,” said spokeswoman Kelli Jones. (Erickson, 9/29)

YouTube is cracking down on the spread of misinformation by banning misleading and inaccurate content about vaccines. The platform announced the change in a blog post Wednesday, explaining that its current community guidelines, which already prohibit the sharing of medical misinformation, have been extended to cover "currently administered" vaccines that have been proven safe by the World Health Organization and other health officials. The site had previously banned content containing false claims about COVID-19 vaccines under its COVID-19 misinformation policy. The change extends that policy to a far wider number of vaccines. (Pruitt-Young, 9/29)

YouTube said it would remove content that falsely alleges approved vaccines are dangerous and cause severe health effects, expanding the video platform’s efforts to curb Covid-19 misinformation to other vaccines. Examples of content that would be taken down include false claims that approved vaccines cause autism, cancer or infertility or that they don’t reduce transmission or contraction of diseases, the Alphabet Inc. division said Wednesday. (Sebastian, 9/29)

YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country. As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous. The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines like those for measles or chickenpox. (De Vynck, 9/29)

Google will start adding details and context about topics and sources to search-engine results, a move to help U.S. users become more literate about the origins of online material and to combat misinformation. The Alphabet Inc. company will add descriptions about listed websites in its own words, reviews of sites from other parties, and information about topics from third-party sources, Google said during its Search On event Wednesday. These details will be findable in the existing “About This Result” panel, accessed by clicking the three dots beside search results. (Grant, 9/29)

Newly confirmed COVID-19 cases have trended downward in Nevada since a summer peak in mid-July as vaccination rates improve. But misinformation about the effectiveness of masks and vaccines being spread by a vocal minority poses serious challenges to turning the tide on the resurgent pandemic, Washoe County’s health district officer warned Wednesday. “I would say that the misinformation is perhaps a greater challenge that we face than the COVID-19 virus,” Kevin Dick told reporters in Reno. “We have the vaccine. We can beat the COVID-19 virus. I’m not sure we can beat misinformation.” (Sonner, 9/29)

Teachers have been grappling with how to help students consume information during the pandemic as social media has allowed falsehoods to spread. (Silva, 9/29)

A constant barrage of misinformation has Idaho health care workers facing increased animosity from some patients and community members, officials say. It’s gotten so bad in northern Idaho that some Kootenai Health employees are scared to go to the grocery store if they haven’t changed out of their scrubs, said hospital spokeswoman Caiti Bobbitt on Tuesday. Some doctors and nurses at the Coeur d’Alene hospital have been accused of killing patients by grieving family members who don’t believe COVID-19 is real, Bobbitt said. Others have been the subject of hurtful rumors spread by people angry about the pandemic. “Our health care workers are almost feeling like Vietnam veterans, scared to go into the community after a shift,” Bobbitt said. (Boone, 9/29)

The long Covid problem might be bigger than we thought. A large study has revealed that one in three Covid-19 survivors have suffered symptoms three to six months after getting infected, with breathing problems, abdominal symptoms such as abdominal pain, change of bowel habit and diarrhoea, fatigue, pain, anxiety and depression among the most common issues reported. (Kottasova and Friend, 9/29)

Mild cases of COVID-19 could also leave a lasting impact on the human brain, according to a recent study. In August, researchers from England's University of Oxford and the Imperial College of London wrote that brain imaging from the UK Biobank – including the data from more than 40,000 people in the United Kingdom, dating back to 2014 – showed differences in gray matter thickness between those who had been infected with COVID-19 and those who had not. (Musto, 9/29)

Two new studies, one in China and one in the United Kingdom, detail persistent COVID-19 symptoms months to a year after acute illness. Today, in JAMA Network Open, Chinese researchers describe "long COVID" symptoms of fatigue, sweating, chest tightness, anxiety, and muscle pain among 2,433 COVID-19 survivors released from one of two hospitals in Wuhan, China, from Feb 12 to Apr 10, 2020. (Van Beusekom, 9/29)

Seven COVID-19 symptoms can maximize detection of COVID-19 in the community, according to a large study published in PLOS Medicine yesterday that looked at data from England's REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission-1 (REACT-1) study. ... By modeling COVID-19 positivity predictability on seven symptoms—loss or change of smell, loss or change of taste, fever, new persistent cough, chills, appetite loss, and muscle aches—the researchers found a 0.75 area under the curve (AUC) for rounds 2 through 7 and a 0.77 AUC for round 8. (9/29)

Type 1 diabetes in those over 40 years of age is linked with higher COVID-related hospitalization risk, while type 2 diabetes is associated with higher mortality in COVID-hospitalized patients, according to a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism and data presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) annual meeting, respectively. (9/29)

As international travel begins opening up more, with the U.S. set to relax restrictions for vaccinated travelers from 33 countries in November, more travelers will dig into in-flight meals. A recent medical study by a group at the University of Greenwich in London finds a 59% higher risk of viral transmission during a one-hour meal service on a 12-hour trip compared with staying fully masked for the whole flight. (McCartney, 9/29)

Demand for the tests has surged in recent months, as the highly infectious Delta variant has spread and schools and offices have reopened. “All the manufacturers are ramping up production, but right now they can be hard to find,” said Gigi Gronvall, a testing expert at Johns Hopkins University. Although rapid tests have their limitations, they are an important public health tool, experts said, particularly if you know how to use them. (9/29)

A second hospital in Alaska is beginning to ration health care as the state deals with a spike in coronavirus cases. Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corp. in Bethel announced the move Wednesday as it reported it is operating at capacity. Rationing of care had already been imposed by Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, which is the state’s largest hospital. (9/30)

Idaho’s unchecked spread of the highly contagious delta variant is sending more kids and babies to hospitals with complications from COVID-19, state health care professionals said Wednesday. Major hospitals and health care clinics in southwestern Idaho are seeing more premature babies born to COVID-19-positive mothers, more children requiring hospitalization and more kids of all ages experiencing mental health problems because of the pandemic, several doctors from Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, St. Luke’s Health System, Primary Health Group and Mountain States Neonatology said during a news conference. (Boone, 9/29)

An increasing number of fully vaccinated people in Maine with COVID-19 are filling ICU beds across the state. Yet those numbers are more representative of Maine’s high vaccination rate than the ineffectiveness of the vaccine, according to health officials. About 30 percent of those with the coronavirus being treated in the ICU at Northern Light’s 10 hospitals were vaccinated as of Tuesday morning. Four out of 13 patients on ventilators were also vaccinated — about 30 percent. While waning immunity could play a role, the far more significant reason for the number of vaccinated patients appears to be the numerical reality of Maine’s high vaccination rate, Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Nirav Shah said Wednesday. Maine has the third highest rate of fully vaccinated people in the country, a factor that is undoubtedly leading to more hospitalized vaccinated people. (Marino Jr., 9/30)

COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are coming down in Oklahoma after the state’s rapid, delta-variant fueled spike over the summer. On Tuesday, Oklahoma’s seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases reported was 1,690, down from a peak of just over 2,800 at the end of August. Hospitalizations, which had topped 1,500 in August, were still over 1,000 on Tuesday across the state. “I’m hopeful that our state will continue to see positive progress in our pandemic response,” Health Commissioner Dr. Lance Frye said in a statement Monday. “We are cautiously optimistic about this downward trend and are thankful for the hard work of Oklahomans across the state that got us here." (Branham, 9/29)

For the first time since June, the rate of new Covid-19 deaths in the US is expected to decrease over the next four weeks, according to an ensemble forecast from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And for the third week in a row, Wednesday's CDC forecast predicted that hospitalizations will decrease as well -- a bit of hope as the more transmissible Delta variant continues to spread. (Holcombe, 9/30)

KHN: Covid Is Killing Rural Americans At Twice The Rate Of Urbanites 

Rural Americans are dying of covid at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated. While the initial surge of covid-19 deaths skipped over much of rural America, where roughly 15% of Americans live, nonmetropolitan mortality rates quickly started to outpace those of metropolitan areas as the virus spread nationwide before vaccinations became available, according to data from the Rural Policy Research Institute. (Weber, 9/30)

The hit Broadway show “Aladdin” was canceled Wednesday night when breakthrough COVID-19 cases were reported within the musical’s company, a day after the show reopened following some 18 months of being shuttered due to the pandemic. It was a worrying sign for Broadway’s recovery. “Through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected within the company of ‘Aladdin’ at the New Amsterdam Theatre,” the show announced on social media. “Because the wellness and safety of our guests, cast and crew are our top priority, tonight’s performance, Wednesday, Sept. 29 , is canceled.” (Kennedy, 9/30)

The Pennsylvania legislature unanimously voted Wednesday to extend dozens of regulatory waivers put into place last year to help health-care providers fight COVID-19. Without action, the waivers would have expired Thursday, potentially exacerbating ongoing staffing crises in hospitals and long-term care institutions, which are again facing rising COVID-19 cases. Health-care workers and their advocates had warned any lapse in the relaxed rules would have renewed administrative burdens and made fighting the ongoing pandemic more difficult. Wednesday’s action will keep the waivers in place until March 2022 while the legislature considers a number of bills that would make the regulatory suspensions permanent. Gov. Tom Wolf will sign the bill. (Ohl, 9/29)

Big data is making a big difference in the fight against COVID-19 in Dallas, and the potential promise goes well beyond the pandemic. Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation, a nonprofit research and data analytics company, is helping providers target their outreach efforts to the most vulnerable residents. PCCI tracks real-time data on vaccinations and COVID-19 cases, and overlays it against underlying health conditions and socioeconomic factors. That creates “a vulnerability index” and other tools that allow officials to assess which areas face the greatest risks — not just at the ZIP code level but in areas as small as census blocks. (Schnurman, 9/29)

KHN: A Covid Test Costing More Than A Tesla? It Happened In Texas

When covid-19 struck last year, Travis Warner’s company became busier than ever. He installs internet and video systems, and with people suddenly working from home, service calls surged. He and his employees took precautions like wearing masks and physically distancing, but visiting clients’ homes daily meant a high risk of covid exposure. “It was just like dodging bullets every week,” Warner said. (Pattani, 9/30)

More than a year after U.S. health care workers on the front lines against COVID-19 were saluted as heroes with nightly clapping from windows and balconies, some are being issued panic buttons in case of assault and ditching their scrubs before going out in public for fear of harassment. Across the country, doctors and nurses are dealing with hostility, threats and violence from patients angry over safety rules designed to keep the scourge from spreading. (Hollingsworth and Schulte, 9/30)

Families of veterans who died in one of the deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks in a U.S. nursing home called Wednesday for changes in how Massachusetts oversees its veterans homes. Members of the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home Coalition said in a virtual hearing held by state lawmakers that Massachusetts’ two state-run facilities — the Soldiers’ Home in Holyoke and the Soldiers’ Home in Chelsea — should be overseen by the state Department of Public Health, not the state Department of Veterans Services. (9/29)

Over the years, Charles Chamberlain has fired off dozens of letters to the editor of his local newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times. The Spring Hill, Fla., man has pontificated on oil prices, Social Security and the influence of money in politics. He has railed against former president Donald Trump’s election-fraud lies and the ‘cold, calculating and cynical’ ethics of herd immunity. Chamberlain, 81, is no fan of Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who he believes has sacrificed public health for partisan politics amid a pandemic that has killed more than 54,000 Floridians. So when DeSantis appointed Joseph Ladapo — a controversial physician who has questioned the safety of the coronavirus vaccines — to serve as the state’s new surgeon general, Chamberlain was, naturally, peeved. (Lipscomb, 9/30)

In a speech on the North Carolina House floor, a lawmaker who recovered from COVID-19 thanked supporters and blamed some Democrats for “vile and nasty” messages he received from people while he and his wife were sick. Rep. Keith Kidwell, a Chocowinity Republican and House deputy majority whip, made his first return to the House floor after being hospitalized in mid-August with COVID-19. (Vaughan, 9/29)

She lived a life of adventure that spanned two continents. She fell in love with a World War II fighter pilot, barely escaped Europe ahead of Benito Mussolini’s fascists, ground steel for the U.S. war effort and advocated for her disabled daughter in a far less enlightened time. She was, her daughter said, someone who didn’t make a habit of giving up. And then this month, at age 105, Primetta Giacopini’s life ended the way it began — in a pandemic. “I think my mother would have been around quite a bit longer” if she hadn’t contracted COVID,” her 61-year-old daughter, Dorene Giacopini, said. “She was a fighter. She had a hard life and her attitude always was ... basically, all Americans who were not around for World War II were basically spoiled brats.” (Richmond, 9/30)

The messages are short. Succinct. Devastating. “Fly with the angels, Peggy.” “To my aunt, one of my favorite humans. We miss you.” “I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make you proud. Te amo grandpa.”“ Sue Kaye Ziemann fought and beat leukemia, but covid took her too soon.” Walking through the hundreds of thousands of white flags blanketing 20 acres of the National Mall to honor the Americans who have died of covid-19, visitors stop to write a few words of farewell on the flags themselves. They are goodbyes that many never had a chance to say in person. It is an intimate goodbye. And a national one. (Sanchez, 9/30)

Surveys have shown that as many as half of unvaccinated workers say they will leave their jobs if they're forced to get the COVID-19 shot, but in reality few of them actually quit. That's according to an article in The Conversation, a nonprofit news organization that covers academic research. Researchers looked at companies that have vaccine mandates in place and saw that, so far, only a fraction of workers leave their jobs when it comes down to it. "In other words, vaccine mandates are unlikely to result in a wave of resignations — but they are likely to lead to a boost in vaccination rates," they write. (Farrington, 9/29)

Kaiser Permanente, Dignity Health, Keck Medicine and other major hospital systems in California say they are well on their way to meeting Thursday’s deadline for the state’s coronavirus vaccination mandate, with several citing vaccination rates of 90% or higher. California was the first state in the nation to announce that all health care workers must be fully vaccinated. The order, which includes physicians, nurses, technicians, janitors and other workers in hospitals, dialysis centers, doctor’s offices, nursing homes, substance abuse centers and other facilities, remains one of the most stringent in the country. Only limited medical and religious exemptions are allowed. On Tuesday, state health officials issued a new order that extended the mandate to in-home, hospice, disability center and senior center health care workers, but gave them an extra two months to comply, until Nov. 30. (Hwang, 9/29)

Two days after the deadline for 32,000 executive branch employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face weekly testing, about 60% of the workers have shown proof of inoculation, Gov. Ned Lamont said Wednesday. Some 19,000 executive branch staff had submitted the documentation as of Tuesday. Another 3,000, or about 10%, filed paperwork demonstrating they are following the weekly testing requirement for workers who opt out of vaccination. The remaining 10,000 employees, about 30%, have yet to hand in paperwork. (Carlesso, 9/29)

So many San Francisco police officers have yet to get COVID-19 vaccinations that officials are preparing to shuffle assignments to ensure that the city can provide core policing services regardless of the number of unvaccinated officers — and whether they remain employed — according to a departmental email obtained by The Chronicle. Police Chief Bill Scott sent the email to the department staff Wednesday saying that 313 department employees — 267 officers and 46 unsworn staffers — remain unvaccinated. The department has 2,835 employees, including 2,122 officers. (Cabanatuan, 9/29)

A judge on Wednesday dismissed an attempt by a group of Denver police officers to block the city’s vaccine mandate from taking effect. In a lawsuit filed last week, seven officers claimed the city lacked the authority to impose the mandate under a local disaster emergency declared by Mayor Michael Hancock at the beginning of the pandemic. They noted Democratic Gov. Jared Polis rescinded his statewide emergency pandemic order in July. The officers said the city should have instead followed the more drawn-out process laid out in state law to impose regulations. (Slevin, 9/29)

Arkansas lawmakers on Wednesday advanced legislation that would allow workers to opt out of their employer’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement if they’re tested weekly or can prove they have natural antibodies. The House and Senate Public Health committees endorsed identical versions of the bill, which also would require the state to pay unemployment benefits to workers who are fired for not getting vaccinated. The bills are among several limiting or prohibiting private vaccine mandates working their way through the majority-Republican Legislature. (DeMillo, 9/29)

AT&T has become one of the largest employers in the U.S. to mandate vaccines for a significant number of frontline workers. The telecom company said Wednesday that its employees in the Communications Workers of America union will be required to be fully vaccinated by Feb. 1, “unless they get an approved job accommodation.” (Arbel, 9/29)

Santa Cruz County residents and visitors are no longer required to wear a face covering indoors. On Wednesday morning, the county Health Services Agency released a statement that the county had moved from substantial transmission (orange) to moderate transmission (yellow) on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 data tracker. Because of this improvement, the mask mandate released by Health Officer Dr. Gail Newel on Aug. 19 has been lifted. (Hartman, 9/29)

FedEx Forum will continue requiring face masks everyone attending basketball games for NBA Memphis Grizzlies and University of Memphis Tigers games and other arena events regardless of vaccination status through the end of October. Wednesday’s announcement follows Shelby County’s health directive continuing its mask mandate. A release stated that unvaccinated spectators 12 years and older must present proof of a negative COVID-19 test at least 72 hours allowed to attend before Grizzlies and Tigers games, starting with the NBA club’s Oct. 20 home opener. Vaccinated fans must show proof of at least one dose for entry. (9/29)

The Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to immediately reinstate a series of new laws that include measures which block schools from requiring masks and remove the power of local governments to impose COVID-19 restrictions. The high court turned down Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s request that the provisions in three state budget bills and an entire budget bill be allowed to take effect. Instead, the court set a briefing schedule for it to consider Brnovich’s request to bypass the Court of Appeals and hear the case directly. (Christie, 9/29)

Michigan lawmakers cannot use the state budget to threaten the funding of local health departments that institute local school mask rules, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a letter to lawmakers Wednesday. The governor considers this pandemic provision in the nearly $70 billion budget unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable. "The legislature cannot unwind the Public Health Code in a budget bill or un-appropriate funds because they take issue with the actions of local health departments," Whitmer wrote in the letter. (Boucher, 9/29)

The U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday that it is awarding more than $420,000 to the Broward County School Board to cover state financial penalties targeting school board members’ salaries. The grant is intended to pay for the salaries of eight Broward board members who voted for a student mask mandate that allows exceptions only for medical reasons during the COVID-19 pandemic. (9/29)

To help keep Utah kids “as safe as possible” from COVID-19, Gov. Spencer Cox promised in August to provide more than 1 million masks for K-12 students, both surgical-style ones and higher quality KN95 masks in small and large sizes. As of Tuesday, 2.2 million masks had been shipped to schools, according Tom Hudachko, spokesperson for Utah Department of Health. Of those, 310,000 were pediatric-sized cloth masks, 700,000 were pediatric-sized three-layer surgical masks, and the rest were KN95s, he said. But low demand for the masks means some Salt Lake County school districts have left them in storage. “I’d say on any given day, average, across the building, I have about a fourth of my kids wearing masks,” John Paul Sorensen, principal at Neil Armstrong Academy in West Valley City, said Tuesday. (Jacobs, 9/29

Going against health guidance, Louisiana’s education department announced Wednesday it’s no longer recommending that public school systems quarantine asymptomatic students who have come into close contact with someone who tests positive for COVID-19. Louisiana’s 69 local school districts already had the ability to determine whether they want to send the students home for days because of exposure to the coronavirus illness. But most of the districts had been following the state education department’s recommendation that those students should be quarantined, even if they don’t show symptoms of COVID-19. (Deslatte, 9/29)

After threats of legal action, Union County’s public school district has agreed to work with the county’s health department to ensure COVID-19 contact tracing steps and quarantine requirements will be followed. The Union County Public Health Department and Union County Public Schools agreed Wednesday on a process for identifying and excluding students and staff who are identified as being a positive case or a close contact of someone who tested positive for COVID-19. (Costa, 9/29)

Ten teachers in the Metro East who refuse to comply with statewide vaccine and mask mandates are suing their school districts over the policies. The lawsuit against Triad, in Troy, and Edwardsville school districts and their superintendents says the mandates were illegally issued. The claim filed in Madison County Circuit Court asks that the teachers be allowed to continue working in their schools. The school districts “don’t have the delegated authority to compel vaccination or testing,” said attorney Thomas DeVore of Greenville. “They could have stood up for their educators … but they don’t want to take on the governor.” (Bernhard, 9/29)

A pediatrician and a medical student at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus are challenging denials of their requests for religious exemptions from the school’s COVID vaccination mandate, arguing in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that administrators are judging the “veracity” of personal religious beliefs in violation of the First Amendment. The U.S. District Court lawsuit filed by the Thomas More Society, a not-for-profit conservative firm based in Chicago, is the latest clash over a growing number of private- and public-sector vaccine mandates nationwide to stem the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 600,000 people in the U.S. (Nieberg, 9/30)

Square pizza and chicken tenders suddenly get swapped for meatloaf and zucchini coins. American schoolchildren and lunch ladies grimace. And now the federal government is stepping in to help. School districts in Kansas can’t get whole-wheat flour, ranch dressing or Crispitos rolled tacos right now. In Dallas, they can’t put their hands on flatware, plates and napkins. In New York, school districts are unable to find antibiotic-free chicken, condiments or carrots. (Reiley, 9/29)

A crucial piece of President Biden’s domestic agenda hung in the balance Thursday, as Democratic leaders moved toward a planned House vote on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that many progressive Democrats have threatened to oppose. ... But the infrastructure measure’s fate was far less clear, as Democratic leaders tried to unify the party’s increasingly combative progressive and moderate wings around changes to a separate $3.5 trillion healthcare, education and climate package. (Duehren and Peterson, 9/30)

Congress is moving to avert one crisis while putting off another with the Senate poised to approve legislation that would fund the federal government into early December. The House is expected to approve the measure following the Senate vote Thursday, preventing a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Friday. (Freking, 9/30)

President Biden is navigating the most perilous week for his legislative agenda yet with an approach he’s honed over his decades in Washington: Hear out the warring factions, determine the realm of the possible and find the point of compromise that satisfies all sides. That strategy has been clear in meetings with pivotal Democrats in the past week, with Biden speaking and hosting a stream of lawmakers — in particular a pair of moderate Senate Democrats who have wielded outsize influence in shaping the president’s agenda. (Kim, 9/29)

Joe Manchin released a statement on Wednesday afternoon panning his colleagues’ spending plans as “fiscal insanity.” Then he started to lay out how he wants to work on President Joe Biden’s family plan. As all of Washington hangs on his every word, Manchin said he did want to clinch a reconciliation bill even as some progressives fear he’s trying to kill the whole thing. But rather than approach the effort as the multi-trillion-dollar social spending and climate change bill envisioned by his colleagues, Manchin said Democrats needed to start with gutting the 2017 Trump tax cuts and go from there. (Everett, 9/29)

Joe Biden knows the way to progressives’ hearts but he’s still trying to figure out what makes Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema tick. Between now and Thursday, the White House is devoting all of its energy to sketching out a framework for a social spending and climate package upon which the factions of the Democratic party can agree. Inside the West Wing, the belief is that it all begins with nailing down the two centrist Senate Democrats on what they can live with in the president’s $3.5 trillion plan, in the hopes that their support will clear a path to pass both that bill and the infrastructure proposal waiting for a vote in the House. (Barron-Lopez and Korecki, 9/29)

Democrats are debating how to divide up what could be a smaller serving of health care spending in President Joe Biden’s domestic policy bill, pitting the needs of older adults who can’t afford their dentures against the plight of uninsured low-income people in the South. “There’s always a battle of where you place your priorities,” Rep. Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democratic leader, said Wednesday. “We don’t means-test Medicare, which means that pretty wealthy people will be getting both dental care (and) vision care while poor people will be denied. ... I don’t know that that’s a real good choice.” (Alonso-Zaldivar, 9/30)

When House Democrats made their pitch for the majority ahead of the 2018 midterms, party leaders focused their message on “kitchen table” economic issues — and one in particular that, according to polls and focus groups, resonated broadly across America’s political divides. “The American people deserve A Better Deal on the cost of prescription drugs,” the midterm platform read, promising an end to pharmaceutical industry price gouging and pledging negotiated prices for Medicare. (DeBonis, 9/29)

Lobbyists for drug companies, oil and gas firms, the tobacco corporations and other U.S. industries are pressuring allies in Congress to gut measures that would help pay for the bill by raising billions of dollars from their industries. ... Drug-industry lobbyists are working to remove provisions that could cost the industry a combined $700 billion over a decade, including one that would allow the government to negotiate bulk discounts for prescription drugs through Medicare. (Mullins and Mann, 9/29)

KHN: As Democrats Bicker Over Massive Spending Plan, Here’s What’s At Stake For Medicaid

Hours after the Supreme Court in 2012 narrowly upheld the Affordable Care Act but rejected making Medicaid expansion mandatory for states, Obama administration officials laughed when asked whether that would pose a problem. In a White House briefing, top advisers to President Barack Obama told reporters states would be foolish to turn away billions in federal funding to help residents lacking the security of health insurance. (Galewitz, 9/30)

Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, is expected to face harsh questioning from senators on Thursday morning about Instagram’s effect on teenagers, addressing accusations that Facebook has known for years that its photo-sharing app has caused mental and emotional harm. The hearing, which starts at 10, is the first of two that the Senate’s consumer protection subcommittee will hold on the effect that Facebook has on young people. The second, on Tuesday, will be with a whistle-blower who has shared information about Facebook’s research on teenagers. (Kang, 9/30)

Facebook late Wednesday released heavily annotated documents discounting its own research into user harm — an attempt to deflect criticism as lawmakers gear up to deliver the company a harsh rebuke on Capitol Hill. The research decks, one called “Hard Life Moments — Mental Health Deep Dive” and another called “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” feature internal research into Instagram’s effects on adults’ and teens’ mental health. (Zakrzewski and Lerman, 9/30)

Political adversaries in Congress are united in outrage against Facebook for privately compiling information that its Instagram photo-sharing service appears to grievously harm some teens, especially girls, while publicly downplaying the popular platform’s negative impact. Mounting public pressure over the revelations have prompted Facebook to put on hold its work on a kids’ version of Instagram, which the company says is meant mainly for tweens aged 10 to 12. But it’s just a pause. (Gordon, 9/30)

Facebook Inc. is scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing on Thursday about its products’ effects on young people’s mental health. The hearing in front of the Commerce Committee’s consumer-protection subcommittee was prompted by a mid-September article in The Wall Street Journal. Based on internal company documents, it detailed Facebook’s internal research on the negative impact of its Instagram app on teen girls and others. (9/29)

Manufacturers "knowingly" sold baby food that contained heavy metals including arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury, according to a House Oversight subcommittee report, published Wednesday. These metals are in the World Health Organization's top 10 chemicals of concern for infants and children, and can affect brain development, according to Harvard Health Publishing. The companies cited either failed to recall contaminated food or were lax in testing, the report found. (Dam, 9/30)

Gerber and Beech-Nut failed to properly test and remove baby foods with dangerous levels of inorganic arsenic from the market, while Sprout Foods Inc., Walmart's Parent's Choice and Campbell's Plum Organics baby food were lax in testing and controlling for heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium, according to a US Congressional report released Wednesday by the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy. (LaMotte, 9/29)

Premiums for federal employees will rise by 3.8 percent on average in 2022, the second straight year of moderate increases despite the coronavirus pandemic, the government announced Wednesday. The pandemic has led to increased costs in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), the Office of Personnel Management said, including roughly $1 billion to test and treat coronavirus patients. But those costs have been partly offset by enrollees skipping routine medical procedures, the OPM said. (Yoder, 9/29)

A group of Republican senators introduced legislation that protects Americans' health records by preventing federal agencies under President Joe Biden from using COVID-19 vaccine passports or requiring proof of vaccination. Text of the legislation, named the Prevent Unconstitutional Vaccine Mandates for Interstate Commerce Act, says it prohibits "the Department of Transportation and other agencies from promulgating rules requiring a person to provide proof of COVID–19 vaccination in order to engage in interstate commerce or travel, and for other purposes." (Morris, 9/29)

Don Young, the longest serving Republican in Congress, hasn't voted in his committees since February 2020. (Wehrman, 9/30)

Suicide among U.S. troops increased 15% in 2020 from the previous year, a troubling trend that has defied Pentagon initiatives to prevent service members from taking their own lives. In 2020, 580 troops died by suicide compared with 504 in 2019, according to figures confirmed Wednesday night for USA TODAY by congressional and Defense Department sources. The sources were not authorized to speak publicly about the figures, which the Pentagon plans to release on Thursday. In 2018, there were 543 suicide deaths among troops. It's not clear why there was a decrease in 2019 followed by a jump in 2020, according to the Defense Department official. (Vanden Brook, 9/29)

A bipartisan group of 144 House lawmakers plans to unveil their agenda Wednesday for expanding access to mental health care and combating the growing drug epidemic after overdose deaths hit new highs, CQ Roll Call has learned first exclusively. The group plans to announce its agenda of 66 bills and one resolution during a midday Wednesday news conference. The 48-page bipartisan blueprint outlining the group's legislative goals includes 12 policy subcategories including prevention, treatment, rural and underserved communities, workforce development, first responders, interdiction, children and families, veterans, prescribing, education, health care access and health parity. (Raman, 9/29)

When Billy Lemon was trying to kick his methamphetamine addiction, he went to a drug treatment program at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation three times a week and peed in a cup. If it tested negative for meth, he got paid about $7. "For somebody who had not had any legitimate money – without committing felonies – that seemed like a cool thing," says Lemon, who was arrested three times for selling meth before starting recovery. The payments were part of a formal addiction treatment called contingency management, which incentivizes drug users with money or gift cards to stay off drugs. At the end of 12 weeks, after all his drug tests came back negative for meth, Lemon received $330. But for him, it was about more than just the money. It was being told, good job. (Dembosky, 9/30)

After 13 years of living with mental illness and three years battling in court, Mikese Morse is finally getting mental health treatment. The cost: another man’s life. Mikese’s saga illustrates how Florida treats those in need of involuntary mental health care — as criminals, relying on cops and courts to solve problems that need medical intervention — with potentially tragic results. (San Felice, 9/30)

Licensed psychologist and crisis response expert Diana Concannon, PsyD, who is dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University, told Insider that van living is an attractive option for many because of rising housing costs and the dramatic increase in remote work-life options resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. But along with the freedom, the financial benefits, and the potential for a viral Instagram account, diving into van life can also be challenging, in particular when it comes to mental health. (Dodgson, 9/28)

Virginia Beach Councilman Michael Berlucchi is proposing a $200,000 grant to the Hampton Roads Workforce Council to address recruitment and retention of mental health care providers in the City of Virginia Beach. Berlucchi believes action must be taken on the mental health crisis in Virginia and the impact it has had in Virginia Beach throughout the pandemic, according to a news release. He believes this program will improve access and delivery services to residents of Virginia Beach who experience mental illness. (Hazzard, 9/30)

For more than a decade, Britney Spears bristled behind closed doors at the court-approved control her father, James P. Spears, held over her life and fortune. Now, for the first time since 2008, Ms. Spears, 39, will be without her father’s oversight, a Los Angeles judge has ruled, as the singer moves toward terminating her conservatorship altogether. (Coscarelli, Jacobs and Day, 9/29)

Monica Lewinsky reflected on the mental health struggles she endured in the 1990s amid the scandal surrounding her affair with then-President Bill Clinton, detailing in a new interview the toll it took and how she has reclaimed her story in the years since. Lewinsky, a former White House intern, told CNN's David Axelrod on an episode of "The Axe Files" podcast released Thursday that the investigation into the scandal, which captured the nation's attention for years and eventually led to Clinton's impeachment, caused her to have suicidal ideations. (Cole, 9/30)

Americans are paying pharmaceutical companies more for the world's 20 blockbuster drugs than the rest of the world combined, according to an analysis of company financial filings by Public Citizen. The U.S. is the pharmaceutical industry's gold mine, and the analysis shows how much the industry has at stake as it fights Democrats' plan to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices and let employers piggyback off those lower prices. (Herman, 9/30)

A study of British patients with a long history of depression highlights how difficult it can be to stop medication, even for those who feel well enough to try. Slightly more than half the participants who gradually discontinued their antidepressants relapsed within a year. By contrast, the relapse rate was lower — almost 40% — for those who remained on their usual medication during the study. (Tanner, 9/29)

Over several months in 2017, a top Purdue Pharma executive and the head of the Addiction Policy Forum, a controversial patient advocacy group, discussed the possibility of working together to combat opioid addiction, according to emails reviewed by STAT. One potential project concerned providing educational resources to people struggling with addiction issues, which the Addiction Policy Forum sought to launch. This occurred around the same time that the pharmaceutical industry trade group, PhRMA, was looking to its members — which included Purdue — to contribute to a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant soon to be awarded to the advocacy group, the emails noted. (Silverman, 9/29)

An experimental CRISPR-based treatment from Editas Medicine led to meaningful improvements in the functional vision of a single patient born with a rare, genetic disease that leads to blindness — a preliminary study outcome that Editas called encouraging but that also raises some concerns its gene-editing approach is not potent enough. The first clinical data from Editas’ treatment, called EDIT-101, were presented Wednesday at a research meeting. One patient out of four treated with a middle dose of EDIT-101 showed meaningful improvements across several different measures of functional vision. A low dose of the treatment tested in two patients was ineffective. (Feuerstein, 9/29)

Hepatitis B and C found a foe in biotech and medical researchers spearheaded or funded by a Chilean biochemist. The work and research fostered by Pablo D. Valenzuela led to a groundbreaking vaccine-making technique and the treatment of those with hepatitis B or C, which each affect more than 1.5 million people worldwide every year, according the World Health Organization. (Franco, 9/28)

A new study that infected willing participants with common cold and flu viruses provides the most rigorous evidence yet that wearable health monitors could predict infections, even before a person starts experiencing symptoms. If the wearables can similarly predict infections in real-world conditions, the technology could add to existing disease surveillance and testing methods. But unresolved issues with standardizing wearables and testing them on diverse populations raise questions about their immediate utility. (Bender, 9/29)

A group of graduate students is expanding a Boston-based biotech entrepreneurship program across the country, hoping to bring in startup founders who might not otherwise have access to training, networking, and mentorship opportunities. The new program, Nucleate, is now looking for would-be founders in often-overlooked cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Houston, as well as in seven other cities. Along with entry-level instructions on how to start a company, early-career scientists and business students can find co-founders, get strategic and legal advice, and meet blue-chip investors — without paying a fee or losing equity. (Sheridan, 9/28)

Over several months in 2017, a top Purdue Pharma executive and the head of the Addiction Policy Forum, a controversial patient advocacy group, discussed the possibility of working together to combat opioid addiction, according to emails reviewed by STAT. One potential project concerned providing educational resources to people struggling with addiction issues, which the Addiction Policy Forum sought to launch. This occurred around the same time that the pharmaceutical industry trade group, PhRMA, was looking to its members — which included Purdue — to contribute to a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant soon to be awarded to the advocacy group, the emails noted. (Silverman, 9/29)

Former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff took the stand in the trial of Elizabeth Holmes for his third day Wednesday, facing an extended and often tense cross-examination from defense lawyers. Defense attorney Lance Wade questioned Rosendorff about his responsibilities as lab director, pointing out that he was responsible for many things, including readying the lab for inspections. Rosendorff shot back, suggesting that it wasn’t reasonable to pin everything on him. (Lerman, 9/29)

As the media started comparing Elizabeth Holmes to Steve Jobs, the former Theranos CEO wrote a note to herself that contained three telling words. “Becoming steve jobs -” Holmes wrote on April 2, 2015, according to documents obtained by CNBC. The note was among more than a dozen pages of diary-like streams of consciousness writings that Holmes typed up to herself that year. CNBC obtained a portion of those notes. (Khorram, 9/29)

It is official: The pandemic's effect on America's waistline has been rough. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed 16 states now have obesity rates of 35% or higher. That's an increase of four states — Delaware, Iowa, Ohio and Texas — in just a year. The findings confirm what several recent research studies have found: Many Americans have gained significant weight since the COVID-19 crisis started, likely fueled by an increase in sedentary behavior, stress and troubles such as job and income loss that make healthy eating harder. And those rates are rising faster among racial minorities. (Noguchi, 9/29)

Diet soda and drinks that contain the artificial sweetener sucralose may increase food cravings and appetite in women and people who are obese, researchers say. In a new study led by the University of Southern California's (USC) Keck School of Medicine and published in JAMA Network Open, scientists studied the effects of an artificial sweetener – or a nonnutritive sweetener (NNS) – both on brain activity and appetite responses in different groups of the population. (Musto, 9/29)

The pandemic has thrust longstanding racial and economic health disparities into bold relief. Americans of color have died from COVID-19 at two to three times the rate of the rest of the population. A primary underlying cause is obesity. “The fact that obesity has proven to be such a significant risk factor for severe COVID-19 illness and death has the potential to focus more public attention on the need to start doing something about it,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, in an interview with Stateline. The effects of obesity account for a large share of the nation's health care spending, but funding for obesity prevention and control has been inadequate for decades, Plescia said. (Vestal, 9/29)

Officials in New Jersey's Camden County have reported a human case of eastern equine encephalitis (EEE). The patient, a resident of Pine Hill, remains hospitalized. "Eastern Equine Encephalitis is transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito. Only a few human cases are reported each year, and the disease can't be passed directly from person to person," said County Commissioner Carmen Rodriguez, in a Camden County press release. "The Camden County Department of Health is continuing to work with the Mosquito Commission to ensure that additional spraying and testing will be conducted in the area." (9/29)

Blake Lynch says he’ll never forget the first time he tried to give blood. It was 2013, and Lynch was a nursing student. He was excited to donate in honor of a classmate with sickle cell anemia. Lynch says he filled out the questionnaire that’s required of all donors. Shortly after, he got the news. "They review it, they’re like, ‘Blake, I’m sorry, but you can’t donate blood,’ " Lynch says. "I was like, ‘Why can’t I donate?’ And they were like, ‘Well, I see you’re gay. So that means you’re banned for life.’ (Prieur, 9/29)

Going on a low-carb diet has long been a popular weight loss strategy. But some doctors and nutrition experts have advised against doing so over fears that it could increase the risk of heart disease, since such diets typically involve eating lots of saturated fats, the kind found in red meat and butter. But a new study, one of the largest and most rigorous trials of the subject to date, suggests that eating a diet low in carbohydrates and higher in fats may be beneficial for your cardiovascular health if you are overweight. (O'Connor, 9/28)

Despite the wide-ranging expansion of telehealth in the past year, there is still a broad swath of the U.S. population it has largely failed to reach: the 57 million people in rural parts of the country. Even now, as employers rush to add virtual care to their benefits, many telehealth companies have avoided rural areas. Several acknowledged to STAT that most of their users remain in urban and suburban areas, and they’ve made far less progress than they’d like to in reaching rural patients. (Brodwin, 9/30)

Independence Blue Cross, the largest insurer in the Philadelphia area, is covering telemedicine appointments as it would in-person visits through the end of October. The deadline has already been extended several times, and may be pushed back further. Uncertain how they will be compensated for virtual visits in the future, some health systems have resorted to charging for telemedicine services — regardless of insurance coverage. “The continuous kicking the can down the road and paying for another few months doesn’t give health systems any confidence,” said Judd Hollander, senior vice president for health-care delivery innovation at Jefferson Health. (Gantz, 9/29)

More than 30 people who opted out of Blue Cross Blue Shield's $2.67 billion antitrust settlement sued the health plan's national association on Monday, alleging the insurers' monopolistic activities increased healthcare costs while decreasing quality of care. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida, comes on behalf of 32 people living in five states and the District of Columbia who were at some point insured under one of 18 Blues plans issued by their employers. These plaintiffs chose not to participate in the preliminary settlement approved by federal Judge David Proctor of the northeastern district of Alabama last year. (Tepper, 9/29)

Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. is weighing an acquisition of Evolent Health Inc., the health-care group that has been under activist investor pressure to consider a sale, according to people familiar with the matter. Evolent rose as much as 18% on the news. The U.S. drugstore chain has discussed a deal with Arlington, Virginia-based Evolent, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing confidential information. Deliberations are ongoing and there is no certainty that Walgreens will decide to move forward with an offer to buy the company, the people added. (Hammond, Davis and Nair, 9/29)

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration is investing $825 million in 231 community mental health centers nationwide to help curb the impact of mental illness during the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding is part of a $2.5 billion financial package from the Biden administration's Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 and Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplement Act of 2021 to help states and territories address the nation's mental illness and addiction crises. Of this sum, $1.65 billion is being put toward substance abuse prevention and treatment block grant funding. (Devereaux, 9/29)

Texas officials on Wednesday defended the state’s strict abortion law that bars the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy and urged a federal judge to allow the measure to stand. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said the court should dismiss the Biden administration’s lawsuit seeking to block the measure that has effectively halted most abortions in the nation’s second-most-populous state. (Marimow and Barnes, 9/29)

A Texas law professor who has criticized the state’s new abortion ban warned U.S. senators on Wednesday that the danger of its rollout is far bigger than just abortion. “A world in which our constitutional rights are worth nothing more than the whims of 50 state legislatures is not a federal system,” said Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s not a system with the rule of law. And frankly, it’s not a system that is going to be sustainable in the long term.” (Blackman, 9/29)

Three congresswomen who will testify about their personal experiences with abortion during a Thursday House hearing on reproductive rights shared their stories in a deeply personal interview Wednesday night. On MSNBC's "The ReidOut with Joy Reid," Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., shared intimate accounts of their decisions to end their pregnancies. Lee said she traveled to a "back-alley clinic" in Mexico with a family friend, an experience she said "terrified" her. (Cox, 9/29)

Nearly a month after the controversial Senate Bill 8 took effect, hardly any legal vigilantes have actually gone to court. But many are waiting to pounce, among them Jeff Tuley, a semiretired owner of a tree nursery near Athens, Texas. “I’m doing it so the Lord God knows where I stand. I mean, there’s too many people that just roll over, and I’m not going to roll over,” Tuley, 64, said by phone. “I’m just one man. And I’ll do what I can do.” He’s one of three Henderson County residents pleading with a federal judge in San Antonio to keep SB 8 in effect so they can sue, if the occasion arises, anyone who aids or abets an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. The trio argue that — rather than depriving women of their rights — they and other would-be plaintiffs under SB 8 are potential victims if the U.S. Justice Department succeeds in blocking SB 8, which would deprive them and “countless others … of their state-law right to bring private civil-enforcement suits against individuals and entities that violate the Texas Heartbeat Act.” (Gillman, 9/29)

Owners of a small business in Bellaire say they are shocked and appalled at one woman's response after they publicly condemned Texas' new abortion ban. Breakfast restaurant, Dandelion Cafe, located at 5405 Bellaire Blvd., called on its followers and other local businesses to stand with them for women's rights on Instagram Monday by showing many of its employees wearing tape with hand-written messages targeting the new law that went into effect on Sept. 1. The messages read: Abortion is Healthcare, Laws off our bodies, bodily autonomy for all, and 86 the Abortion Ban. (Welch, 9/29)

According to court documents provided by the state Attorney General's office, a different Yellowstone County judge will preside over a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of Montana seeking to halt the implementation of three new abortion laws in Montana after the state asked to disqualify the original judge. According to a notice of judge substitution filed in Yellowstone County District Court on Wednesday and signed by the deputy clerk of the court, District Court Judge Gregory Todd, who said last week he would decide on issuing an injunction on the laws before Friday, is off the case and was replaced by District Court Judge Rod Souza. (Michels, 9/29)

Louisiana will extend its Hurricane Ida food stamp application period by three days due to high demand, officials said Wednesday. The Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program, or DSNAP, opened Sept. 20 and now will run through Oct. 13. About 850,000 Louisianans who already receive regular food stamps, about one fifth of the population, need not apply; DSNAP is for those who don't normally qualify, officials said. State officials said that in the first phase of the disaster program, they received 100,000 calls and 73,000 applications, and were logging as many as 350 calls per second. They project 185,000 Louisianans will apply. (Pierce, 9/29)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven new laws on Wednesday aimed at addressing the state’s homelessness crisis, pleading with a skeptical public to have patience as the nation’s wealthiest and most populous state struggles to keep people off the streets. Among California’s myriad problems — including wildfires, historic drought and a changing climate impacting them both — homelessness is perhaps the most visible, with tens of thousands of people living in encampments in cities large and small across the state. (Beam, 9/30)

The spread of COVID’s delta variant is slowing California’s economic recovery as it seeks to rebound from the epic job losses that devastated the state and Bay Area at the start of the pandemic, according to the state’s leading economic forecast, released Wednesday. The growth of California’s job market is expected to trail the United States in 2021, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast, which just six months ago projected that the Golden State would bounce back much faster than the nation. Now, forecasters said, it will be 2022 before the state is poised to charge past the nation. The latest quarterly forecast found that California didn’t really roar back to recovery after the statewide economy was formally reopened in June of this year. In fact, measured by nonfarm payroll employment, California’s job market is predicted to grow by just 1.8% over the course of this year — less than half of the 3.7% increase projected for the nationwide economy. (Avalos, 9/29)

A new report from the Baltimore Office of the Inspector General raises concerns about dead rodents, water damage and fluctuating temperatures that put medical supplies in jeopardy at a city-run sexual health clinic in Druid Heights. Inspectors conducted a site visit in December 2020 where they found the clinic at 1515 North Ave. in Baltimore struggled with rodents in its basement, water damage and water leak issues, an outdoor dumpster constantly overflowing with trash from neighbors and temperature control issues that employees said have caused delays in testing for sexually transmitted diseases. (Wagner, 9/29)

Residents of North Carolina’s state veterans nursing homes would get much more attention from the General Assembly under a state House budget proposal that could bring numerous changes to the state’s approach to publicly-funded, yet privately managed homes. Meanwhile, a Georgia for-profit company has again won a five-year contract to manage the four homes, where 39 residents died from COVID-19 infections last year. PruittHealth, of Norcross, Ga., earned a renewal of the contract by bidding against two competitors for the business of running the homes, according to an NC Department of Administration spokeswoman. (Goldsmith, 9/30)

More than $18 million will go to 27 West Virginia health centers to strengthen health care infrastructure and assist health care in medically underserved communities, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said. The funding is distributed through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the American Rescue plan, Manchin said Wednesday. It will be used to support expansion and renovation projects and support COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccinations, Manchin said in a news release. (9/30)

An unusual Grafton development that would provide supportive housing for adults with autism has gained a key part of its financing. Woodside Prairie would feature four six-bedroom homes at the northwest corner of Hunter's Lane and Port Washington Road. Construction is to begin next spring, with the units opening in fall 2022. Around half the 24 units are still available. Each house would have a shared kitchen, living room and dining room. Woodside Prairie would hire staffers who are trained to work with people with autism. (Daykin, 9/29)

KHN: Death In Dallas: One Family’s Experience In The Medicaid Gap 

For years, Millicent McKinnon of Dallas went without health insurance. She was one of roughly 1 million Texans who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid in the state but too little to buy their own insurance. That is, until she died in 2019. She was 64 and had been unable to find consistent care for her breast cancer. Lorraine Birabil, McKinnon’s daughter-in-law, said she is still grieving that loss. “She was such a vibrant woman,” she said. “Just always full of energy and joy.” Health insurance for roughly 2.2 million Americans is on the table as Congress considers a spending bill that could be as high as $3.5 trillion over the next decade. (Lopez, 9/30)

The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday offered a first glimpse of the COVID-19 protocols that will be in place at the upcoming 2022 Winter Games in Beijing – including lengthy quarantines for unvaccinated participants, daily COVID-19 testing and the absence of international spectators. The countermeasures, which were proposed by local Beijing organizers and detailed in an IOC news release, mirror those at the recent Summer Games in some respects and appear more strict in others. (Schad, 9/29)

The International Olympic Committee on Wednesday released a preliminary set of health protocols for the upcoming Winter Games in Beijing that suggested that the next Olympics, set to start on Feb. 4, could be the most extraordinarily restricted large-scale sporting event since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games will take place in what organizers called a “closed-loop management system,” a bubblelike environment in which athletes, officials, broadcasters, journalists and a large Games work force will be forced to eat, sleep, work and compete, without leaving, from the day they arrive to the moment they depart. (Keh, 9/29)

Cases, as well as deaths, continue to drop globally, but infections continue at very high levels, with about 3.4 million cases recorded over the past week, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in its weekly pandemic update yesterday. Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, the WHO's technical lead for COVID-19, said yesterday on Twitter that the trends show a mixed picture, with far too many cases continuing to be reported when the world has the tools to drastically cut the numbers of illnesses and deaths. (Schnirring, 9/29)

AstraZeneca Plc's COVID-19 vaccine demonstrated 74% efficacy at preventing symptomatic disease, a figure that increased to 83.5% in people aged 65 and older, according to long-awaited results of the company's U.S. clinical trial published on Wednesday. Overall efficacy of 74% was lower than the interim 79% figure reported by the British drugmaker in March, a result AstraZeneca revised days later to 76% after a rare public rebuke from health officials that the figure was based on "outdated information." (Steenhuysen, 9/29)

India is preparing to produce its own mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year, in what would be a scientific breakthrough for the country’s growing pharmaceutical industry and help expand the range of global production hubs for the shots. A host of companies across the world are pushing to bring their own vaccines using the mRNA technology to market following the success of the Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. shots. Indian firms, urged on in part by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aim to be significant players in the new sector, with Gennova Pharmaceuticals Ltd. hoping to be the first. (Roy, 9/29)

The Pan American Health Organization has struck a deal with the Chinese manufacturer Sinovac to buy millions of Covid-19 vaccines for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean as part of an effort to make more shots available in a region where access has been highly unequal. The agency, part of the World Health Organization, is negotiating with two other manufacturers and expecting to announce new deals soon, Dr. Jarbas Barbosa, its assistant director, said at a news conference on Wednesday. (Politi, 9/30)

Fewer than 20% of people in most southeast Asian countries are fully vaccinated, which has led to COVID-19 outbreaks and forced apparel factories to shut down. U.S. companies can't change international vaccination rates on their own, and the problem illustrates another reason Americans have a self-interest in supporting the effort to vaccinate other countries. Besides preventing more virus mutations, better vaccination rates in southeast Asia would improve the flow of consumer goods like sneakers and apparel. (Herman, 9/30)

Australia’s Victoria state on Thursday reported a jump of more than 50% in daily COVID-19 cases, which authorities largely blame on Australian Rules Football parties last weekend that breached pandemic regulations. State capital Melbourne traditionally hosts the annual grand final which the football-obsessed city celebrates with a long weekend. (McGuirk, 9/30)

Vladimir Putin broke two weeks of self-isolation to meet Recep Tayyip Erdogan in person Wednesday, but the Turkish leader seemed unimpressed with the Russian president’s immunity to Covid-19, and his offer of a locally made booster shot.“ It’s very low,” was Erdogan’s response after Putin reported his antibody level (“around 15 or 16”), according to video broadcast on Russian state TV. Putin was describing the outbreak among dozens of his staff earlier this month that led him to shift from in-person meetings to videoconferences. (Reznik and Kozok, 9/29)

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to hamper efforts to diagnose and treat tuberculosis (TB), and international funding for the disease remains inadequate, according to new data from a TB research and advocacy group. The data, released in a report today from the Stop TB Partnership, show that 1.2 million fewer people have been diagnosed and treated for TB in 2021 than in 2019, suggesting the pandemic's impact on TB treatment and diagnosis has been nearly as bad as it was in 2020. And the money being provided for the global TB response is only half of what's needed. (Dall, 9/28)

Air pollution likely contributed to almost 6 million premature births and almost 3 million underweight babies in 2019, according to a UC San Francisco and University of Washington global burden of disease study and meta-analysis that quantifies the effects of indoor and outdoor pollution around the world. (UC San Francisco, 9/28)

There are more than 100 known types of PAH compounds emitted daily into the atmosphere. Regulators, however, have historically relied on measurements of a single compound, benzo(a)pyrene, to gauge a community's risk of developing cancer from PAH exposure. Now MIT scientists have found that benzo(a)pyrene may be a poor indicator of this type of cancer risk. In a modeling study appearing today in the journal GeoHealth, the team reports that benzo(a)pyrene plays a small part -- about 11 percent -- in the global risk of developing PAH-associated cancer. Instead, 89 percent of that cancer risk comes from other PAH compounds, many of which are not directly regulated. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 9/22)

Flu levels in both hemispheres remain below expected levels, despite increased testing, but several regions have reported sporadic cases and activity, the WHO said yesterday in an update that covers the first half of September. In the Americas, some Caribbean and Central American areas reported sporadic influenza B cases. In tropical parts of Africa, a few influenza A cases were reported in Western, Middle, and Eastern countries. (9/28)

The World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners today called for urgent action to address meningitis, while launching the first ever global strategy to battle the disease, called the Global Roadmap to Defeat Meningitis by 2030.By 2030, the goals are to eliminate epidemics of bacterial meningitis—the deadliest form of the disease—and to reduce deaths by 70% and halve the number of cases, the WHO said in a press release. (9/28)

An analysis of US health insurance data found that post-discharge prophylactic antibiotics are commonly prescribed after mastectomy, but provide only a small reduction in surgical-site infections (SSIs), researchers reported today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. Using a database that includes outpatient pharmacy claims for individuals covered by employer-sponsored and commercial health insurance plans, researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis studied a cohort of women ages 18 to 64 who underwent mastectomy from January 2010 through June 2015. Their aim was to investigate the factors associated with post-discharge prophylactic antibiotic use and the impact on SSIs. (9/27)

New research amongst the world's biggest consumers of dairy foods has shown that those with higher intakes of dairy fat -- measured by levels of fatty acids in the blood -- had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those with low intakes. Higher intakes of dairy fat were not associated with an increased risk of death. (George Institute for Global Health, 9/21)

Eating your daily calories within a consistent window of 8-10 hours is a powerful strategy to prevent and manage chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, according to a new manuscript published in the Endocrine Society's journal, Endocrine Reviews. (The Endocrine Society, 9/22)

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Memphis, Tennessee, recently made a strange but increasingly more common seizure: a package filled with counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards imported from China. More than 120 similar packages filled with thousands of fake cards, with typos and misspelled words, have been seized this year in Memphis alone. As more municipalities, music venues, universities and employers institute vaccine requirements, many unvaccinated people are reevaluating their decision and are getting the COVID-19 vaccine. On the other hand, some are deciding to violate the law by creating fraudulent vaccine cards. As chief legal officers for our states, we want all our constituents to understand that selling or using fake vaccination cards is illegal and can result in fines or jail time. (Josh Stein and Herbert Slatery, 9/29)

As New York pushes forward with some of the toughest and farthest-reaching vaccine mandates in the nation, thousands of health care workers in the state appear to be willing to be fired rather than get vaccinated. So, too, do thousands of people who work in New York City’s public schools. How sad that many of these vaccine holdouts are supported by their unions. Talk about a lack of solidarity. (Mara Gay, 9/29)

There are positive signs that business and government vaccine mandates are succeeding. While the total number of unvaccinated people in the United States is still way too large — only 64.9 percent of eligible Americans are fully vaccinated — the idea of mandates is taking hold, and hopefully will become the norm. United Airlines became the first U.S. carrier to require vaccines for its workforce, and the results are impressive. Out of a workforce of roughly 67,000 people, fewer than 3 percent applied for exemptions on health or religious grounds, and 1 percent didn’t comply. The company said it has begun the process of terminating 593 employees who declined to be vaccinated and did not seek exemption. The airline’s chiefs got it right in their statement that “everyone is safer when everyone is vaccinated, and vaccine requirements work.” (9/29)

As the summer of 2021 started to unfold, many Americans thought the pandemic was beginning to fizzle out. But that illusion is over and the country is once more besieged by the coronavirus. Intensive care units across America are again teeming with Covid-19 patients. Only 55% of Americans are fully vaccinated, and just 39%  globally. This sets the stage for the emergence of new and deadly variants that will not heed national borders. (Robert Goldberg, 9/30)

If you’ve heard about COVID-19 outbreaks in nearby businesses, it’s probably because you learned about it from news reporters. Instead of requiring transparency from all California companies, state lawmakers failed workers and consumers by gutting a bill that would have required full transparency whenever there are COVID outbreaks at workplaces.Wouldn’t you like to know if the staff at your local coffee shop or furniture store is having a rash of COVID sickness? (9/29)

It feels like sticking my foot into a hot hornet’s nest. Right on time, the pain shoots up my entire leg, making it hard to walk. Each agonizing step is a reminder of a minor health issue that should have been easily remedied all those years ago, but wasn’t. All because I, like so many others in Texas, didn’t have access to affordable health care. For people like me with chronic pain, standing can be excruciating. This pain limits the hours I can work and activities I can participate in with family and friends. Yet, throughout the pandemic, I have regularly reported for a job as a grocery store clerk, ready to provide the same level of care for my customers that I’ve always shown despite the now-added danger of contracting the virus myself. No matter what happens, someone has to do the essential but risky jobs to keep our state going. I’ve felt a sense of duty and pride in serving my community during such a terrible time. (Amber Ayala, 9/30)

It’s been nearly a month since our country’s cruelest abortion ban went into effect. As of midnight Sept. 1, most Texans seeking abortion care have been left powerless and afraid. Providing abortion care in Texas was difficult before, but now we are living in a dystopian nightmare. Let me share what it was like on the night of Aug. 31 at Whole Woman’s Health of Fort Worth. In the hours leading up to midnight, the waiting room was filled with patients hoping to get an abortion before Senate Bill 8 went into effect. Staffers and doctors had been working since 7:30 a.m., and they were still there providing abortions until 11:56 p.m. Outside, the antiabortion protesters kept us under tight surveillance all day long. Come nightfall, they shined flashlights into patients’ cars, the clinic and the parking lot. Inside the clinic, there was love, support, bravery, integrity and deep commitment to human rights. We held out hope that the Supreme Court would bar the law from going into effect. But that justice never came. (Amy Hagstrom Miller, 9/29)

Congress is hashing out the details of a $3.5 trillion spending package that could lower Medicare’s eligibility age from 65 to 60. The proposal would severely disrupt not just the Medicare program but the broader market for private insurance. And it would do so at a great cost. (Janet Trautwein, 9/29)

Covid-19 caught the U.S. flatfooted. With supply shortages, the availability of intensive care unit beds, staffing challenges with nursing shortages, and physician burnout from witnessing thousands of deaths in isolation, the pandemic laid bare the amount of improvement needed in the hospital sector. Looking back, the country would have been on better footing if it had made different decisions about competition a decade ago when the hospital industry successfully lobbied to prevent physicians from owning and operating hospitals and billing Medicare. (Brian J. Miller and Jesse Ehrenfeld, 9/30)

During Texas’ three legislative sessions this year, our leaders have focused on restricting voting, health care services and free speech. Meanwhile, they have again failed to act to improve health care access for their constituents despite bipartisan support for the latest bill, Live Well Texas (HB 3871/SB 117). Their priorities are gravely misplaced. Lawmakers in opposition may not realize that barriers to health care access have negative impacts not only on low-income Texans, but also on the providers who struggle to serve them. (Brandon Altillo, 9/29)