Why it matters: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared a "severe emergency incident" and launched a nationwide lockdown on Thursday after announcing a person had tested positive.
The U.S. will be "vulnerable" to coronavirus without more COVID vaccine booster shots to keep American safe, White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said Thursday.
The U.S. and other world leaders pledged Thursday more than $3 billion in new funding to fight the pandemic globally at the Biden administration's second Global COVID-19 Summit.
Driving the news: "This includes over $2 billion for immediate COVID-19 response and $962 million in commitments toward a new pandemic preparedness and global health security fund at the World Bank," the White House said.
President Biden ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff on Thursday to honor the Americans who have died from COVID-19 as the death toll nears 1 million.
What they're saying: "One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a Nation forever changed because of this pandemic," Biden said in a statement.
Deaths from COVID-19 are on the rise again after several weeks of upward ticking case rates sparked by Omicron variants.
Driving the news: The U.S. averaged roughly 365 daily deaths, up 7% from about 342 two weeks ago. That's still a fraction of where things stood several months ago when the daily average was in the thousands.
Drugs for treating opioid abuse aren’t reaching most high-risk patients, potentially widening gaps in care as overdose deaths hit record highs.
The big picture: New provisional data show a 15% surge in overdose deaths during the pandemic, rekindling a debate over whether enough Americans in the throes of the addiction crisis have access to potentially life-saving treatments.
Congressional Republicans' concerns about wasting COVID vaccines are colliding with the Biden administration's commitment to making the shots as widely accessible as possible, adding anotherwrinkle to the stalled COVID funding negotiations.
The intrigue: Some Republicans are growing skeptical of the currently available vaccines' ability to contain the Omicron variant, and don't want to allocate money for more doses without a firmer plan in place for the fall.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared a "severe emergency incident" and launched a nationwide lockdown on Thursday after announcing a person had tested positive for COVID-19, state media reports.
Why it matters: It's the first time Pyongyang has publicly confirmed having a case in the country, though health experts have long raised doubts that it's been unaffected by coronavirus infections. The isolated nation has no COVID vaccines, raising concerns it could become an epicenter of new variants, per the Washington Post.
More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.
Why it matters: The grim milestone, a 15% increase from overdose deaths in 2020, occurred during the coronavirus pandemic, which also killed over 415,000 in the country that year and almost 1 million in total so far.
More than four in 10 hospitals have seen staffing shortages limit their ability to discharge patients because of a lack of post-acute care, according to a survey provided exclusively to Axios by CarePort Health, a care coordination software company.
A week after the maker of a controversial Alzheimer's drug announced it would largely stop marketing it, Congress is readying legislation that tinkers with the pathway used by the FDA to approve the drug, but avoids making large-scale changes.
Why it matters: Aduhelm's approval created heightened scrutiny around whether the FDA's "accelerated approval" process is being used appropriately. But as the drug fades largely into the background, so are the calls for stringent reforms.
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