Category: Health

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he is encouraged by data released by Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) on its COVID-19 anti-viral medicine and his administration has ordered enough of the pills to treat 10 million Americans. “Getting vaccinated and getting your booster shot remain the most important tools we have to save lives. But if this treatment is indeed authorized — and once the pills are widely available — it will mark a significant step forward in our path out of the pandemic,” Biden said in a statement. Pfizer said…

The US death toll from Covid-19 topped 8,00,000 on Tuesday, a once-unimaginable figure seen as doubly tragic, given that more than 2,00,000 of those lives were lost after the vaccine became available practically for the asking last spring. The number of deaths, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Atlanta and St. Louis combined, or Minneapolis and Cleveland put together. It is roughly equivalent to how many Americans die each year from heart disease or stroke. The United States has the highest reported toll…

The US Senate on Wednesday voted to block President Joe Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large private employers, in a symbolic win for conservatives that will have little tangible effect. The measure passed 52-48 with the support of all 50 Republicans in the upper chamber and two centrist Democrats, but is not expected to fare well in the House of Representatives, where it may only have support from the right. Under Biden’s plan, all companies with more than 100 workers will have to require their employees to be immunized or undergo…

The fast-spreading omicron variant of the coronavirus has now been reported in 50 countries and 19 states, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She added, “we expect that number to continue to increase.” States that have detected the variant range from Hawaii to Texas to Massachusetts. The reports are part of a new surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. that now tops 100,000 cases per day. While officials and researchers are concerned about the transmissibility of the omicron variant, they also…

Some of the U.S. cases involve people who hadn’t traveled recently, meaning the variant was likely already circulating domestically in some parts of the country. The arrival of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in the U.S. has health officials in some communities reviving contact tracing operations in an attempt to slow and better understand its spread as scientists study how contagious it is and whether it can thwart vaccines. In New York City, officials quickly reached out to a man who tested positive for the variant and had attended…