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Five years ago, Covid took hold and the world transformed almost overnight. As routines and rituals evaporated, often replaced by grief, fear and isolation, many of us wondered: When will things go back to normal? Could they ever? Today, for many, the coronavirus pandemic seems far away and foggy, while for others it’s as visceral […] More
We left a world we might not get back to. Many things that we took for granted never returned to their former levels, with no guarantee they ever will. The pandemic took a hammer to society and left us struggling to climb back from shutdowns, from fear and from illness. It can be easy, in […] More
The judgment was issued in a case brought by the Missouri attorney general. The Chinese government did not respond to the claims in court.A federal judge in Missouri found the Chinese government responsible for covering up the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and hoarding protective equipment in a ruling on Friday. He entered a judgment of more than $24 billion that Missouri officials vowed to enforce by seizing Chinese assets.The lawsuit, filed by the Missouri attorney general’s office in April 2020, during the early months of the pandemic, accused the Chinese government of withholding information about the existence and spread of the virus and then of cutting off the supply of personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., from the rest of the world. China did not respond to the allegations in court, and officials at the country’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.In his ruling, Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. wrote that “China was misleading the world about the dangers and scope of the Covid-19 pandemic” and had “engaged in monopolistic actions to hoard P.P.E.” Those actions, he said, hampered the early response to the pandemic in the United States and made it impossible to purchase enough equipment for medical providers responding to the virus.Judge Limbaugh, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, imposed the judgment against China, its governing Communist Party, local governments in China, as well as a health agency and a laboratory in the country.Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, said in a statement that the ruling held China accountable for its actions.“China refused to show up to court, but that doesn’t mean they get away with causing untold suffering and economic devastation,” said Mr. Bailey, a Republican. “We intend to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets, including Missouri farmland.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The defendants, part of a group known as “United Patriots,” aimed to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution by giving power to an all-powerful Kaiser.Five people have been sentenced to prison over what the authorities in Germany described as a plot to kidnap the country’s health minister on live television in 2022 in an attempt to destabilize the German state.After a nearly two-year trial, a court found on Thursday that the five, under a group billed as the “United Patriots,” had planned to create a widespread weekslong power outage and then use the chaos to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution ceding power to an all-powerful Kaiser.They were convicted of founding or joining a terrorist group, of treason and in some cases of owning illegal guns, rifles and explosives.Jörn Müller, a spokesman for the court, in Koblenz in western Germany, said the trial had “shown that a democratic constitutional state is capable of dealing with its alleged opponents on the basis of law and order in a fair and independent trial.”The court sentenced a 46-year-old man whom it had determined to be the group’s central figure to eight years in prison. A 77-year-old woman who holds a Ph.D. in theology and frequently interrupted the court hearings with antisemitic and conspiracy-theory-laced diatribes was handed a sentence of seven years and nine months. Three other men, all in their 50s, received sentences ranging from six and a half years to two years and 10 months.In accordance with German privacy laws, the court identified the defendants only by their initials.The five were part of the Reichsbürger scene, a loosely affiliated antisemitic far-right grouping that does not accept the legitimacy of the modern German state. Their planned overthrow was not directly related to a far more complex, and far more dangerous, plot surrounding a disgruntled prince that is currently being tried in three separate courts in Germany.After meeting and radicalizing on a Telegram chat group during the pandemic, members of the plot tried to buy and hoard weapons and other tools for their plans, according to the case brought by the prosecutors. Police searches after their arrest in 2022 yielded 52 packets of low-grade explosives, with which the authorities said the group hoped to use to disable large parts of the power grid.Members of the group were arrested while trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles, mines and bulletproof vests. The seller was an undercover police officer and the exchange was a setup.The five convicted on Thursday had focused their ire on Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, a medical doctor and former professor who has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. During the pandemic, he was an outspoken proponent of vaccination rules, often appearing on television panel shows to explain the medical science behind the spread of the coronavirus.On Thursday, he thanked the German police for keeping him safe. “The state has shown that it can defend itself against violent conspiracy theorists,” he said on social media. More
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist who came to prominence crusading against lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, faced questioning from the Senate health committee on Wednesday morning as President Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health.The agency, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, has been rocked lately by the Trump administration’s efforts to block government spending and shrink the federal work force. Hours before Wednesday’s hearing, the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, trumpeted the cancellation of N.I.H. grants.Dr. Bhattacharya, who has a medical degree and is a professor of medicine but has never practiced, has expressed an interest in restructuring the agency and reducing the power of “scientific bureaucrats” who he has said end up “dominating a field for a very long time.”His views on medicine and public health have at times put Dr. Bhattacharya at odds with many of the scientists whose research the N.I.H. oversees.While he has defended vaccines and has said he was dubious that they caused autism, Dr. Bhattacharya told an interviewer last year that he could not rule out a link. “I don’t know that for a fact,” he said. Extensive evidence shows no link between immunizations and autism.Dr. Bhattacharya became a go-to witness in court cases challenging Covid policies, including mask mandates. In several cases, judges said he was disregarding facts or was untrustworthy. His detractors note that while he has published studies on health policy issues — like drug prices and the link between different types of health insurance and H.I.V. deaths — he is not a scientist conducting biomedical research, the core mission of the agency.But supporters have said that Dr. Bhattacharya could bring needed reform to the N.I.H. and have defended some of his contrarian views on Covid.Dr. Bhattacharya burst into the news at the height of the pandemic in October 2020, when he co-wrote an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, that argued for “focused protection” — a strategy that would focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.The nation’s medical leadership, including Dr. Francis S. Collins and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denounced the plan. Referring to Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors as “fringe epidemiologists,” Dr. Collins wrote in an email that “there needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises.”Dr. Collins, who later stepped down as the N.I.H. director to pursue his laboratory research, retired last week in anticipation of Dr. Bhattacharya’s arrival. More
In a small study, patients with the syndrome were more likely to experience reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus and high levels of a coronavirus protein.The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study.Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood.The study was posted online Wednesday and has not yet been published in a scientific journal. “I want to emphasize that this is still a work in progress,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who led the work.“It’s not like this study determined what’s making people sick,” she said, “but it’s the first kind of glimpse at what may be going on within these people.”Independent experts noted that the findings were not conclusive on their own. Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny, they said.“One of the most important things is that we get some attention to really shine a light on this and try to understand exactly what it is,” said John Wherry, director of the Institute for Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. (Dr. Wherry has previously collaborated with Dr. Iwasaki’s team, but did not participate in this work.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Oxygen is vital to many medical procedures. But a safe, affordable supply is severely lacking around the world, according to a new report.At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people in poor nations died literally gasping for breath, even in hospitals. What they lacked was medical oxygen, which is in short supply in much of the world.On Monday, a panel of experts published a comprehensive report on the shortage. Each year, the report noted, more than 370 million people worldwide need oxygen as part of their medical care, but fewer than 1 in 3 receive it, jeopardizing the health and lives of those who do not. Access to safe and affordable medical oxygen is especially limited in low- and middle-income nations.“The need is very urgent,” said Dr. Hamish Graham, a pediatrician and a lead author of the report. “We know that there’s more epidemics coming, and there’ll be another pandemic, probably like Covid, within the next 15 to 20 years.”The report, published in The Lancet Global Health, comes just weeks after the Trump administration froze foreign aid programs, including some that could improve access to oxygen.Boosting the availability of medical oxygen would require an investment of about $6.8 billion, the report noted. “Within the current climate, that’s obviously going to become a bit more of a challenge,” said Carina King, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute and a lead author of the report.Still, she said, governments and funding organizations should prioritize medical oxygen because of its importance across health care. People of all ages may need oxygen for pneumonia and other respiratory conditions, for severe infections including malaria and sepsis, for surgeries and for chronic lung conditions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
There is very little that Americans can agree on these days. Half of people report that religion is very important to them, while more than a quarter say it’s not. Just under half of parents are satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, while the other half are not. Even sports, often considered America’s pastime, draw the interest of only a little over one third of Americans.But one thing nearly everyone agrees on? Vaccines are good.This simple fact has been overshadowed by fears about what will happen to vaccine policy under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of health and human services. Mr. Kennedy has a long history of vaccine skepticism, and critics fear his leadership could lead to interference with vaccine programs or even withdrawal of vaccines from the market. Such moves are already roiling some state health programs. In Louisiana, the Health Department will “no longer promote mass vaccination,” instead leaving vaccine education to medical providers.What has been overlooked in discussions about Mr. Kennedy’s future agenda is one key fact: Vaccines remain enormously popular. Given this broad support, politicians should think twice about targeting something so widely valued.Recent reports in the news media and medical journals highlight a decline in the proportion of kindergartners who have received the measles, mumps, rubella shot. In the last five years, national coverage has fallen to 93 percent, from 95 percent, and in some states like Idaho, it is as low as 80 percent. But while these numbers fall short of the national goal of 95 percent required to maintain herd immunity for measles, they remain a resounding show of confidence.This confidence extends not just to the M.M.R. vaccine. Some 92 percent of American children received the polio vaccine by age 2, and more than 90 percent were vaccinated against hepatitis B. And it’s not just because of school requirements. Nearly nine in 10 Americans — including 86 percent of Republicans — say the benefits of childhood vaccines outweigh the risks.Unlike children, who typically have regular checkups and managed vaccination schedules through their pediatricians, many adults don’t have a doctor checking in with them on immunization. Yet nearly eight in 10 adults have still received at least one Covid-19 vaccination. Four in 10 get the annual flu vaccine, which prevents severe illness but not infection. That number rises to 70 percent among older adults, the population most at risk. While there is room for improvement, these numbers are solid indicators that vaccines are in good standing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
