Lauren Hepler | CALMATTERS

It’s been 22 months and three unemployment appeals since Nicolas Allen’s last job in Fresno. In the time it has taken the 44-year-old graphic designer to win a fraction of the benefits that he applied for, his wife has weathered a high-risk pregnancy, his youngest son was born and his family has been pushed to the financial brink.

Now, Allen is one of thousands of Californians who say they lost jobs due to the pandemic but are still fighting lengthy legal battles over unemployment money that state and federal relief programs were designed to provide. It’s a ripple effect of earlier benefit backlogs that ensnared some 5 million people at the state Employment Development Department, which officials have said was unprepared and overwhelmed by mass job losses.

Those caught up in payment disputes say they have struggled with debt, housing and necessities like food or health care. Meanwhile, no one is publicly tracking how many appeals cases and lawsuits might end up costing workers or taxpayers in a state that still owes the federal government nearly $19 billion in unemployment debt. “It’s easier to not think the money’s there,” Allen said. “Because if I worry about it too much, it’s too painful.”

The EDD has paid out $188 billion in unemployment benefits since the first pandemic shutdowns. State and federal officials waived many ordinary application requirements as millions of claims flooded in, and the agency has acknowledged that up to $31 billion was paid to scammers in the rush to distribute money quickly. Along the way, state watchdogs say up to 1 million workers were wrongly denied benefits — many mistakenly flagged for committing fraud themselves. “Accusing people of fraud is a big deal,” said George Warner, director of the Wage Protection Program at San Francisco’s Legal Aid at Work. “And the EDD does it very casually, very frequently.” The biggest logjam of contested unemployment cases lies in a state appeals process, where more than 1 million workers have asked for a review of EDD’s decisions in their cases since March 2020.

About 880,000 of those cases have already been transferred and heard by a lesser-known state labor agency, the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, where the average case is still languishing for 139 days before a hearing with a judge, federal data shows. Dozens of workers who have exhausted this state process have elevated their claims even further, to appellate or superior courts. Finally, advocacy groups and hundreds more workers have joined proposed class-action lawsuits against the EDD or its debit card contractor, Bank of America.

Both the EDD and the Appeals Board refused requests for interviews to discuss workers’ concerns and state efforts to respond. The agencies also referred some inquiries to one another or offered conflicting answers, raising questions about how delays and associated costs are being tracked. Gregory Crettol, assistant director of the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, told CalMatters in a statement that the Appeals Board has hired and trained 105 judges and 100 new support staffers since the onset of the pandemic. The board is also rolling out a new online system for workers to track their cases, and officials said at an April meeting that judges are now closing almost twice as many cases per month as pre-pandemic.

Still, “Given the historic backlog of appeals,” Crettol said in a statement, the Appeals Board “anticipates it will likely take several more years to completely resolve before workload returns to normal levels.” Unemployment cases are complex and vary widely, but workers awaiting disputed funds have faced similarly dire challenges. A 33-year-old video editor in Burbank had to create a GoFundMe to restart her life during a gender transition.

A security guard In L.A. County worried whether fellow workers still seeking unemployment would end up in the homeless camps he once patrolled. A 62-year-old temp worker in Sacramento spent months terrified she’d lose her car, and a legal office manager in Southern California filed for food stamps and MediCal to survive an appeal with no end in sight. “I really feel like I’m a hostage,” said the office manager, who asked to be identified only as Carole M. and has been awaiting an appeal hearing since November. “I had no money, and I kept saying: ‘How long is this going to take?’” Fraud fury Like many of California’s COVID-era unemployment challenges, slow and unwieldy payment disputes aren’t new. But the pandemic did two things: unleash an unprecedented flood of 29 million jobless claims, and supercharge anxiety about a new generation of online fraud.

Rival politicians have seized on jobless claims filed in the name of death row inmates and YouTube rappers bragging about EDD-fueled spending sprees. Investigators attribute the bulk of pandemic unemployment fraud to organized identity theft. Unemployment attorneys, meanwhile, say they’re seeing regular workers who thought they were eligible for benefits disqualified — and sometimes charged with lying — in cases that can sometimes be explained by confusion about state forms, clerical errors, language barriers or disagreements between workers and employers. “It’s so wrong,” said Assaf Lichtash, founding attorney of Los Angeles-based Pershing Square Law Firm. “The way I see it, the EDD is punishing regular civilians that are just filing for benefits who make honest mistakes — they’re punishing them for their failure to safeguard the money from fraudsters.”

State reports have also highlighted a disconnect between the EDD’s ham-fisted approach to large-scale fraud and what some say seems like a hair-trigger impulse to flag individual workers. Organized scammers evaded the agency’s automated application systems early in the pandemic, one September 2020 report by a governor-appointed EDD Strike Team found, while the vast majority of individual workers scrutinized in manual reviews appeared to be innocent. “Processes intended to block fraud are slowing service delivery without catching fraud,” the Strike Team wrote, since just .02% of the 1.3 million cases flagged that summer appeared to be real fraud. “The cost of finding that small number of imposters is extremely high.”

A separate report last August by the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that, during the pandemic, state appeals judges overturned EDD unemployment denials up to 80% of the time. That report highlighted another sample of 1.1 million unemployment claims stopped due to fraud concerns by an EDD consultant early in the pandemic, where at least 600,000 cases were later “confirmed as legitimate” and workers saw payments needlessly delayed.

Even before COVID upended the job market, the Analyst’s Office estimated that improper unemployment denials cost workers $500 million to $1 billion a year in unpaid benefits. The agency also noted “concerning steps” at EDD in recent years that “suggest that ensuring eligible workers get benefits is not among its top priorities.” The EDD refused to discuss its approach to appeals during the pandemic. Over the past three years, the agency has invested heavily in new anti-fraud technology and sought federal waivers for some workers who may have received extra federal pandemic unemployment funds “through no fault of their own.”

For workers who still want to fight an unemployment case, the first step is to notify the EDD in writing. The EDD then transfers the case to a local office of the Appeals Board, which schedules a hearing with an administrative judge. If a worker or business still feels that their case is unresolved, they can file another appeal with the state-level office of the Appeals Board, or eventually escalate the case to a superior or appellate court. As of March, the average first-level appeals case with a judge was taking 139 days — a lag not as extreme as some other states, U.S. Department of Labor data shows, but still roughly triple the federal government’s 30- and 45-day targets for state unemployment appeals.

This kind of surge is predictable after a recession; the Appeals Board heard about 1.6 million cases in the years around the Great Recession, Crettol said. But workers like Allen, the Fresno graphic designer, have seen first-hand how pandemic cases can be complicated by a heightened focus on fraud and differing interpretations of emergency health orders. In Allen’s case, he told state officials that he quit his job in July 2021, when the Delta variant of the coronavirus was raging and his wife was instructed not to be vaccinated against COVID-19 while navigating a high-risk pregnancy. Since health precautions like masking were not strictly enforced at his in-person job as a sign installer, Allen wrote in a state appeals filing, he quit “to eliminate the risk of bringing COVID-19 home.”

One unemployment payment arrived, but then the money stopped. “I was told that it had been reported that it was a fraudulent claim,” Allen said. “Because my former employer was claiming that I quit without cause.” So began an odyssey that involved months of arguing about pandemic protocols, clerical confusion over a brief freelance gig and paperwork ping-ponging between the EDD and the Appeals Board. After the second appeal, a state judge awarded Allen about six weeks out of the six months of benefits he applied for — securing around $3,000 of the $10,000 he sought, not counting potential federal unemployment supplements available during the pandemic — but denied the rest after questioning how actively he was seeking work while caring for two children under age 2.

Across the state, some 170,000 other appeals cases are still pending, according to the most recent data reported by the U.S. Department of Labor. Crettol said the Appeals Board is encouraged that new appeals have started to decline in recent months, and cited a lower state count of 154,000 backlogged cases through the end of March — a discrepancy that he said stems from differences in how state and federal numbers are reported due to funding sources and EDD processing times. Attorneys like Lichtash add that for those stuck waiting, one challenge is a lack of information about if and when a case has been transferred to the Appeals Board from the EDD, the latter of which he called a “black hole.” The EDD said in a statement to CalMatters that it sends cases to the Appeals Board in an average of three days.

The Appeals Board offered a conflicting number: that it receives about two-thirds of appeals within a week after an appeal is filed, which Crettol said could differ due to how the two agencies track processing times. Neither agency regularly tracks the “monetary value” of appeals cases, or how much the state is being awarded or ordered to pay, spokespeople said. For workers like Allen caught in the fray, the price of being caught up in the confusion has been high.

His family slashed expenses like cable TV and was able to refinance their house, which they credit with avoiding falling behind on the mortgage. But Allen said they were still forced to borrow money from family and take on credit card debt, putting everyday luxuries like a dinner at a restaurant with their kids out of reach. “It’s horrible. I mean, we’re living off my paycheck,” said Allen’s wife, Sharon, who works in human resources. “We’ve almost divorced a few times because of it.” A path for reform? In many ways, unemployment advocates like Jenna Gerry say the pandemic has shone “a spotlight” on chronic problems with the state’s job safety net, from worker confusion over benefit denials to delays at EDD to inconsistent anti-fraud efforts.

The question she and others are asking now is whether state officials will act to change the system that has once again gone haywire, or whether workers caught up in pandemic disputes will be left to bear the brunt of the confusion. “It was a perfect storm,” said Gerry, a senior staff attorney with the National Employment Law Project. “Instead of being like, ‘Wow, that was really bad. How do we make reforms now?’ … all people want to lift up is fraud, and not actually look at the systemic issues.” The biggest underlying issue, Gerry said, is that millions of California workers — such as gig workers, undocumented workers and others in tenuous hourly positions — aren’t eligible for normal unemployment benefits. That was why the federal government started emergency jobless programs like Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.

But subsequent high rates of fraud in the emergency program have complicated conversations at the federal and state levels about whether to make elements of the program permanent to cover more workers. One potential change that advocates are watching closely in California is a plan to finally upgrade the state’s unemployment technology. The Appeals Board says it is rolling out a new system now, and the EDD is preparing to launch an effort called EDDNext.

The challenge will be ensuring that such projects are more effective than other costly upgrades after the Great Recession, which audits said buckled at the EDD during the pandemic. Among the more targeted reforms that state agencies have recommended, but which legislators have yet to act on: removing the EDD from the appeals process, expanding the role of the Appeals Board or adding a new surcharge for businesses that frivolously appeal unemployment insurance (UI) claims. “To correct state practices that have the effect of limiting UI payments,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office wrote last summer, “the state should give the appeals board the authority and responsibility to set UI policy and practices.”

As these debates drag on, some unemployment advocates and workers are taking matters into their own hands. In one Alameda County lawsuit against the EDD, the Sacramento-based Center for Workers’ Rights negotiated a February settlement to head off more payment disputes. The EDD agreed to cancel around 5,000 notices of overpayment sent to workers already past a year-long statute of limitations, and to refrain from sending other similar notices past the allowed timeframe.

The agreement applies only to workers not flagged for potential fraud, leaving attorneys to worry that others still caught up in disputes or unsure how to contest their cases will slip through the cracks. Workers marked for making false statements to EDD face severe penalties — they could be forced to repay the money at high interest, have their wages garnished or be disqualified from collecting benefits if they lose a future job. “The burden is generally put on the claimant to appeal,” said Daniela Urban, executive director of the Center for Workers’ Rights. “But these notices never should have been issued.”

Farther south, in Burbank, Madeline Maye is still seeking some form of closure two years into another proposed class action lawsuit. The timing couldn’t have been worse in mid-2020, when, in the midst of hormone therapy and a gender transition, the video editor became one of the thousands of California workers who noticed money draining from their unemployment debit cards in alleged fraudulent charges.

The next year, she joined a class action claim against the state’s debit card contractor, Bank of America, which is now awaiting a hearing date before a federal judge in San Diego. Bank of America has filed to dismiss the suit and declined to comment on ongoing litigation.

It was separately fined $225 million last year by federal regulators for what they deemed “botched disbursement of state unemployment benefits.” In Maye’s case, it took about six months to get her unemployment money back from the bank, forcing her to start a GoFundMe account to pay rent and buy essentials like new clothes to restart her life.

Her lawsuit is one of several that will test what justice might look like after the state’s job safety net failed. “I got my money back, but it was one of the worst times in my life,” Maye said. “It felt like I was alone — that no one gave a shit about me.”

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Hospitals should be places you can trust to provide comfort and healing when you’re most vulnerable. But that trust may have been shattered by brutal Covid protocols that critics claim turned many hospitals into hellscapes of systematic medical murder.

The victims’ stories have been muffled by the mainstream media, but they’re starting to break through. For one thing, lawsuits against three hospitals have been filed in California by 14 bereaved families who claim their loved ones were killed by a deadly protocol. Meanwhile, activist organizations like Protocol Kills, the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, and American Frontline Nurses are collecting and documenting stories from bereaved families about what happened to their loved ones when they entered a hospital hoping for healing and, instead, were led to bizarre and tortured deaths.

I find it heartbreaking to read their stories, which share a haunting similarity, a feeling of being trapped in a highly organized nightmare. The ritual progresses in predictable stages: first, the patient is isolated from family, who are unable to advocate for their loved one or monitor what’s happening. Next, the patient is diagnosed with Covid-19 or Covid pneumonia, even if they came to the hospital because of a broken arm. Then, they’re bullied into getting remdesivir, a highly toxic drug which killed 53 percent of Ebola patients who had the misfortune to take it. Next, according to the California lawsuit, “They are placed on a BiPap machine at a high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe.

Their hands are often tied down so they can’t take the BiPap machine off their face.” I know this is getting unbearably painful to read, but stay with me to the bitter end to memorialize the victims’ suffering. As the patients writhe in agony, psychiatrists are brought in to diagnose them with agitation and sedate them. Now, shot up with remdesivir, sedated with drugs that make it tough to breathe against the BiPap ventilator, and strapped down in restraints, the victims are denied food and sometimes even water. Should they try to summon help, they may find the hospital played a vicious trick on them, placing their phone and call button for the nurse out of reach.

In the final stages, they are intubated and slowly die alone, left to rot into a skeletal corpse with bed sores. Is this America? It’s almost impossible to comprehend the magnitude of this moral collapse. How did doctors and nurses who spent years studying so they could help people all of a sudden turn into ruthless sadists, presiding over enforced deaths? How did hospitals metastasize from places of healing into chambers of horror? According to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), the answer is quite simple: money.

The federal government incentivized this protocol with massive payouts to the hospitals. AAPS writes, “Our formerly trusted medical community of hospitals and hospital-employed medical staff have effectively become “bounty hunters” for your life.” AAPS explains that two Covid emergency acts from the government created this catastrophic loss of life. The CARES Act, a $2 trillion stimulus package, was passed in 2020, purportedly to ease the financial impact of Covid on American families. It provided gigantic bonuses to hospitals to institute federal protocols on Covid, ensuring that Covid would be massively diagnosed and treated with deadly combinations of remdesivir, ventilators, and other lethal methods. Now that this top-down death protocol was bought and paid for, the government made sure that patients and their families were helpless to fight against it.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) granted waivers to hospitals allowing them to remove critical patient rights. Your ability to give informed consent, receive visitors, and be free from solitary confinement – gone! Vanished, obliterated with a single magical government “waiver.” These actions destroyed the ability of doctors to make independent judgements based on their patients’ needs and turned highly trained medical staff into killer robots obeying the federal government’s commands. If you want to understand the enormity of the government money gusher, here’s AAPS on what the hospital payments included:

• A “free” required PCR test in the Emergency Room or upon admission for every patient, with government-paid fee to hospital.

• Added bonus payment for each positive COVID-19 diagnosis.

• Another bonus for a COVID-19 admission to the hospital.

• A 20 percent “boost” bonus payment from Medicare on the entire hospital bill for use of remdesivir instead of medicines such as Ivermectin.

• Another and larger bonus payment to the hospital if a COVID-19 patient is mechanically ventilated.

• More money to the hospital if cause of death is listed as COVID-19, even if patient did not die directly of COVID-19.

• A COVID-19 diagnosis also provides extra payments to coroners.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died due to these protocols, and we urgently need an investigation into this butchery. Who designed this protocol, which forbade safe drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and incentivized known toxins like remdesivir? Who enforced it? Were hospital administrators personally rewarded for their participation in this scheme? Were patients illegally deprived of their constitutional rights and defrauded with phony medical information? Why were patients denied nutrition and water? How was hospital staff forced to comply? Where’s the money trail? Who signed off on it?

Understanding what happened in the hospitals is a crucial piece of solving the Covid puzzle. A vast ecosystem of confusion, manipulation, and artificially induced panic was created by the government and their media lackeys to stampede the public into welcoming soul-crushing lockdowns and dangerous experimental injections. Hospitals were shut down for elective surgeries, depriving them of their usual income and making them more desperate for government payouts. Covid patients were forced into nursing homes, immediately killing thousands of frail victims and terrifying the public with the skyrocketing death count. Safe, widely used drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were demonized, and studies were fabricated to lie about their effectiveness. Doctors and scientists who tried to speak the truth were fired, investigated, and censored. Why?

We’re living through a time of historic crimes against humanity, rife with atrocities that once would have been unimaginable in America. We don’t yet know how many innocent people were killed in the hospitals during Covid, but whatever that number is — some experts estimate hundreds of thousands — it’s too many. Every one of those innocent dead was someone’s son, daughter, mother, father, husband, wife, friend.

For all the faceless dead, let’s pause for a moment to pay tribute to Grace Schara, a sweet 19-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who died on October 13, 2021, at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Appleton, Wisconsin. Grace was injected with a lethal mix of sedatives and as she sank into death, her sister was prevented from seeing her by an armed guard. Her parents begged over Facetime for the nurse to save her, but they were told that Grace was coded DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), although they had ordered the hospital to take all life-saving measures. Alone, uncomprehending, and in pain, Grace slowly died as her parents watched on Facetime. Her father, Scott Schara, is now suing the hospital to “pave the way for thousands of other victims’ families to file similar claims.” Grace was loved. May her memory be a blessing and an inspiration.

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The U.S. national emergency to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ended Monday as President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to bring it to a close after three years — weeks before it was set to expire alongside a separate public health emergency.

The national emergency allowed the government to take sweeping steps to respond to the virus and support the country’s economic, health and welfare systems. Some of the emergency measures have already been successfully wound-down, while others are still being phased out. The public health emergency — it underpins tough immigration restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border — is set to expire on May 11.

The White House issued a one-line statement Monday saying Biden had signed the measure behind closed doors, after having publicly opposed the resolution though not to the point of issuing a veto. More than 197 Democrats in the House voted against it when the GOP-controlled chamber passed it in February. Last month, as the measure passed the Senate by a 68-23 vote, Biden let lawmakers know he would sign it.

The administration said once it became clear that Congress was moving to speed up the end of the national emergency it worked to expedite agency preparations for a return to normal procedures. Among the changes: The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s COVID-19 mortgage forbearance program is set to end at the end of May, and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now returning to a requirement for in-home visits to determine eligibility for caregiver assistance.

Legislators last year did extend for another two years telehealth flexibilities that were introduced as COVID-19 hit, leading health care systems around the country to regularly deliver care by smartphone or computer.

More than 1.13 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 over the last three years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including 1,773 people in the week ending April 5.

Then-President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar first declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31, 2020, and Trump declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency that March. The emergencies have been repeatedly extended by Biden since he took office in January 2021, and he broadened the use of emergency powers after entering the White House.

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By Amber Dance

FDA, CDC will likely back another booster for at-risk groups

After weeks of rumors about spring boosters, the FDA is expected to approve a second round of omicron-specific shots for people who are 65 and older or immunocompromised, report Laurie McGinley and Lena H. Sun at The Washington Post.

The official announcement and CDC endorsement is expected within weeks, officials told the reporters.

The FDA will not specifically recommend the shots, but will allow anyone in those high-risk groups who is at least four months out from their first omicron booster to get another.

About 42% of people 65 and older have received the initial omicron booster shot.

These shots will be free since the federal government still has an ample stockpile of the boosters.

POC, non-English speakers at higher risk to lose Medicaid

As of April 1, a handful of states have begun removing people from Medicaid rolls for the first time in three years, as a pandemic-aid program that prevented them from doing so has come to an end.

Other states are expected to begin cutting people from their Medicaid lists this spring or summer.

Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program gained about 20 million enrollees during the pandemic, reports Noah Weiland at The New York Times.

An estimated 15 million stand to lose that coverage over the next 14 months as states gradually step up programs to verify eligibility.

Many of those kicked off Medicaid will likely sign up for other coverage via the Affordable Care Act, but others will likely wind up without insurance. Those who earn too much for Medicaid but not enough for Obamacare subsidies are particularly at risk.

About 7 million of those who are likely to lose coverage are probably still eligible for Medicaid but will fail to reenroll for one reason or another.

For example, if they’ve moved, crucial letters might not reach their new address.

“Whenever these sorts of moments happen, it’s people of color, it’s kids, it’s people that don’t speak English that are always hit the hardest,” Natalie Davis of the nonpartisan advocacy group United States of Care told The Times.

As pandemic-era benefits like Medicaid and food stamps return to their pre-COVID levels, low-income Americans will spend less, which could damage the economy overall, notes Abha Bhattaraj at The Washington Post.

FDA authorizes new medication for severe cases

Physicians have a new option for severely ill COVID patients, reports Ingrid Hein at MedPage Today.

The FDA has granted emergency use authorization for an antibody that should tamp down the overactive immune response that endangers people with severe COVID.

Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, called the medicine a “potentially life-saving treatment option for the sickest COVID-19 patients.”

While the immune system is needed to fight off the virus, too much immune activity can worsen the disease, causing inflammation and blood clots.

The new antibody, called vilobelimab, sticks to one of the early cellular activators of that inflammation to stop it.

In an international trial, vilobelimab reduced the death rate for critically ill COVID patients by about 19%.

It’s authorized for hospitalized patients who require machines to support their breathing or blood circulation.

The FDA warned the medicine comes with downsides: It can lower the body’s ability to fight off other infections and cause allergic reactions.

Long COVID researchers push for more funding

Investigators studying long COVID have called for a much larger investment in the problem, which they say affects one in 13 U.S. adults.

The researchers, part of the NIH’s Researching COVID-19 to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, say the current health care system isn’t set up to help people with long COVID. 

There are no best practices for clinical care of long COVID, nor is there a coordinated national effort to develop such practices.

“Long COVID sufferers must navigate health care resources on their own,” write the collaborators in their call to action. “Many don’t know where to go or whom to call.”

The investigators are calling for $37.5 million from Congress to establish a network of long COVID care centers to study the condition, educate other providers, reach out to people with long COVID, and help coordinate their treatment.

The RECOVER program has also drawn fire for planned studies on exercise therapy, reports Rachel Fairbank at Nature.

Patient advocates note that many people with long COVID have symptoms that are exacerbated by exercise, so the study could put them at risk.

“In a world where there’s hundreds of things to trial, why are we choosing this one thing that we know has the potential to cause harm to a substantial portion of patients?” asked Lisa McCorkell, co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative advocacy group.

Advocates asked the NIH to release the exercise study’s rationale and protocol, and invite public commentary, before proceeding. They also urged researcher to screen out patients whose symptoms are likely to get worse after exertion.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill Monday that directs the federal government to declassify as much intelligence as possible about the origins of COVID-19 more than three years after the start of the pandemic.

The legislation, which passed both the House and Senate without dissent, directs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify intelligence related to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. It cites “potential links” between the research that was done there and the outbreak of COVID-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. The law allows for redactions to protect sensitive sources and methods.

U.S. intelligence agencies are divided over whether a lab leak or a spillover from animals is the likely source of the deadly virus. Experts say the true origin of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 1.1 million in the U.S. and millions more around the globe, may not be known for many years — if ever.

Biden, in a statement, said he was pleased to sign the legislation.

“My Administration will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID–19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said. “In implementing this legislation, my Administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.”

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By Amber Dance

One-quarter of parents told lies about kids at height of pandemic

Rampant COVID-related deceptions likely contributed to the pandemic’s spread and death toll, according to the authors of a new study in JAMA Network Open. 

The researchers, from several states and the United Kingdom, surveyed 580 U.S. parents in December 2021 and found nearly 26% had told some sort of falsehood about their kids, such as hiding the child’s COVID-positive status or lying about age to acquire a vaccine early, reports Chia-Yi Hou at The Hill. 

Most commonly, parents didn’t tell a close contact of their child about the kid’s known or suspected case of COVID, or they let the child break quarantine rules. 

Parents cited personal freedom most often as the reason for their actions.

“The goal of the study is to make policymakers aware of how rampant this is,” senior author Angela Fagerlin, a psychologist at the University of Utah, told Angie Leventis Lourgos at the Chicago Tribune. 

Some parents reported they sent their child to school despite COVID illness or exposure because they had to go to work, highlighting the difficulties of working parents during the pandemic.

“I think it’s important that we support families so that parents can make the best decisions for their families, but also for their communities,” Fagerlin said. 

The team previously reported that almost 42% of U.S. adults had bent the truth about their COVID status or protective measures, or avoided testing or quarantine when they should have done so.

Study finds nonwhite people suffered more from COVID

A UK-based research team, after examining 77 studies from around the world, found widespread ethnic inequalities in the outcomes of COVID-19.

The team sought to link known inequalities in severe disease and death with infection risk and prognosis. They amassed data on more than 200 million people from studies conducted across six continents, for what they call the “most comprehensive summary of ethnic inequalities in a range of outcomes, during the first few years of the pandemic.” 

The data the team analyzed was all collected before October 4, 2022, so these infections mostly took place during a time without widespread immunity. The researchers wrote they would likely follow up by analyzing groups with different immunity levels, from different vaccines or exposure to different variants.

“We observed large differences in infection risk for minoritized ethnic groups,” the authors write in their paper in eClinicalMedicine. Black, South Asian, and mixed-race people were more likely to test positive than white individuals. The biggest difference was among South Asian populations, where people were three times as likely to test positive compared to white majority populations.

Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people were more likely to require hospitalization, and death was more likely for Hispanic, mixed-race, and Indigenous groups.

“Response and recovery interventions must focus on tackling drivers of ethnic inequalities which increase exposure risk and vulnerabilities to severe disease, including structural racism and racial discrimination,” write the authors.

Experts tell Congress lab leak warrants more investigation

House Republicans investigated the origins of the coronavirus in their first hearing on March 8.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic heard testimony from former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, international relations expert Jamie F. Metzl, and former New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade.

No witnesses offered any new evidence, reports Trevor Hughes at USA Today, “but instead cited events, grant proposals and other incidents as too coincidental to ignore.”

Redfield argued for a “moratorium” on so-called “gain-of-function” virology research, reports Sarah Owermohle at STAT. “I think it’s caused the greatest pandemic we’ve ever seen,” he told the subcommittee.

Simply put, gain-of-function research is a term borrowed from genetics that means giving organisms new abilities, though the term has only been applied to virology recently, often in politically charged contexts. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology near the pandemic’s epicenter had conducted such studies with U.S. funding before the pandemic began.

The subcommittee’s Democrats also called on Dr. Paul Auwaerter of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He stressed that the origins may never be uncovered, and that claims unsubstantiated by data fuel mistrust.

“We can still learn valuable information from these investigations,” said Auwaerter. “We should use that information to prevent outbreaks and pandemics with environment or human based origins.”

Diabetes drug reduces long COVID risk

The medication metformin is safe, cheap, and available in good supply — and it could prevent long COVID, according to the results of a preprint, not yet peer-reviewed, posted March 6 by The Lancet. 

The researchers randomized more than 1,000 participants to take one of three drugs within less than seven days of COVID symptom onset. They tested metformin, a diabetes drug; ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug; and fluvoxamine, an antidepressant; a combination of metformin plus one or the other drug; and placebo controls.

People who took metformin were 42% less likely to later be diagnosed with long COVID than people who got the placebo. If they took it within four days of symptom onset, their risk dropped by 50%. Ivermectin and fluvoxamine didn’t make a difference.

Scripps Research physician Dr. Eric Topol, who wasn’t involved in the study, expressed excitement on his Ground Truths newsletter. He noted metformin costs as little as $1 to $2 per week and is unlikely to cause side effects if taken for just two weeks, as in the trial.

“If I got COVID, I’d take metformin,” he wrote.

Not everyone might see the same level of reduced risk, notes Ingrid Hein at MedPage Today. Unvaccinated individuals were responsible for the majority of benefit observed in the study.

The study also focused on adults who were overweight or obese, and the drug might work better in that population, said author Dr. Carolyn Bramante of the University of Minnesota. The coronavirus may hide out in fat tissue, and metformin can reduce inflammation in fat. So, Bramante reasoned, people with more fat might be more likely to benefit from the treatment. 

Metformin also boosts T cell immunity, so it might help immunocompromised people, Bramante speculated.

The study took place during the omicron era, when some studies suggest long COVID was already less of a risk than with earlier variants. In unpublished research that will be presented at a conference in April, researchers found that people infected during omicron were no more likely to report ongoing symptoms than people who never had COVID, reports Alice Park at Time.

Paxlovid can also reduce risk one’s chances of long COVID, notes Carly Severn at KQED. The drug cut risk by 25% in a Veterans Affairs study released as a preprint last fall.

That may be because Paxlovid minimizes the time the immune system has to react to the virus in the bloodstream, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong of UCSF.

Chin-Hong urged people to assume they qualify for Paxlovid and consider taking it.

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By Amber Dance

COVID and associated factors killed prisoners at high rates in 2020

The death rate in state and federal prisons rose by almost 50% during the first pandemic year, according to a new UCLA data project.

Prisons saw a bigger change in their death rate than the nation overall, and even higher than the increase in deaths in nursing homes, report Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Allie Pitchon at The New York Times.

“Never before have the country’s prisons seen such a steep increase year-to-year,” write Michael Everett and Lauren Woyczynski in an introduction to the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project.

The project relied on online research, web scraping, and public records requests to tally 6,182 prison deaths in 2020. For comparison, there were 4,240 deaths in 2019, and the prison population overall actually dropped in 2020.

A combination of factors led to the elevated vulnerability of prisoners. Prison populations are aging, due to lengthy sentences handed down during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Prisons are also understaffed, because the jobs tend to be poorly paid and dangerous, and some people didn’t show up to work over COVID fears.

It’s difficult to recruit medical staff too, and many prisoners couldn’t visit outside physicians during the pandemic.  

“Clearly the pandemic is the story, but it is just a part of the story,” said Aaron Littman, acting director of the UCLA project. 

A lack of testing early on could also have made it harder to control infections, suggested Chrysti Shain, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Corrections Department.

Many infections may have been missed, or deaths not properly linked to COVID, due to “inadequate and opaque testing regimens,” write Everett and Woyczynski.

Pandemic impacted motherhood choices unequally

The pandemic could have long-term effects on family planning, with women of color and those who lost income due to COVID among those most affected, according to a new study in the journal SSM – Population Health.

The authors, from UC San Francisco and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, surveyed more than 2,000 women in July of 2020, and again the following January, about whether the pandemic had influenced their thinking about fertility. 

Just over half the women reported a reduced desire to have a child, or an intention to delay doing so, during the first pandemic summer. By the following winter, 46% still said the pandemic had a negative influence on their childbearing desires.

Women who were Latina, Black, multiracial, or Indigenous were more likely to plan to delay having a child than white women in July 2020. These same groups were more likely to have a decreased interest in having a child overall six months later. 

Pandemic income loss was also associated with changes to childbearing preferences, including a loss of desire or wish to delay.

“These unequal effects are likely to further drive longstanding reproductive inequities in the U.S.,” write the authors. “As the effects of the pandemic persist, and in the face of the next crisis, it is critical that health care resources, including abortion access, family planning, maternal health, and fertility care, are directed to populations most at risk of long-term consequences.”

Idaho lawmakers aim to criminalize mRNA vaccinations

If two Idaho Republicans get their druthers, giving someone an mRNA-based vaccine in the state would become a misdemeanor.

State Sen. Tammy Nichols and Rep. Judy Boyle introduced the bill to ban mRNA technology, by updating the criminal code, starting of July 1.

Idaho already has one of the nation’s lowest COVID vaccination rates.

Nichols told the Idaho House Health and Welfare Committee that the pair “have issues” with the speed at which the COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were developed.

“Nichols said there is no liability, informed consent or data on mRNA vaccines,” reports Alexandra Duggan at KTVB7 in Boise.

There is plenty of data on COVID vaccine efficacy and safety. While not all states have informed consent laws for vaccines, recipients are given vaccine information statements that cover risks and benefits. 

However, it’s true that neither drugmakers nor the FDA can be held legally accountable for vaccine side effects. 

“The recent bill introduced in Idaho is another frightening example of politicians and special interest groups trying to take away the rights of individuals and parents to make health care decisions,” Dr. Daniel Griffin of the Optum Care network told USA Today’s Thao Nguyen. 

Such a ban, if enacted, would bar Idahoans from not only COVID vaccines, but other mRNA vaccines under development against infectious diseases such as flu, as well as to treat cancer.

The next step in Idaho would be a committee hearing and vote.

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Nearly 30 million Americans who got extra government help with grocery bills during the pandemic will soon see that aid shrink — and there’s a big push to make sure they’re not surprised.

Officials in 32 states and other jurisdictions have been using texts, voicemails, snail mail, flyers and social media posts — all in multiple languages — to let recipients know that their extra food stamps end after February’s payments.

“One of the scenarios you don’t want to see is the first time they’re aware of it is in the checkout line at the grocery store,” said Ellen Vollinger, an official with the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit organization.

For the average recipient, the change will mean about $90 less per month, though for many, it could be much more, an analysis shows. Benefits will return to usual levels, which are based largely on a household’s income, size and certain expenses, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

A public notice in Michigan urged the 1.3 million recipients in that state to “seek needed resources” to make up for the cuts.

“We want to make sure our clients are prepared for this change, as we realize inflation is affecting all of us,” said Lewis Roubal with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Jacqueline Benitez, 21, who works as a preschool teacher in Bellflower, California, expects a significant cut, perhaps half, of the $250 in food benefits she has received since 2020 through CalFresh, the state’s SNAP program.

“It’s such a lifesaver,” said Benitez, who was previously homeless, but now lives in a subsidized one-bedroom apartment. “Food is such a huge expense. It’s a little nerve-wracking to think about not having that.”

Benitez said she’s already thinking twice about paying $5 for fresh fruit.

“What happens if it goes bad?” she said.

The emergency program was enacted by Congress at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and expanded a year later. Originally, the extra benefits were intended to continue as long as the COVID-19 public health emergency was in force. It’s now set to expire in May.

Food aid cuts loom for 30 million in US

Nearly 30 million Americans who got extra government help with grocery bills during the pandemic will soon see that aid shrink — and there’s a big push to make sure they’re not surprised. (Feb. 23) (AP video by Eugene Garcia)

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But 18 states have already rolled back payments for more than 10 million people and Congress decided to end the program early, trading the extra benefits for a new permanent program that provides extra money to low-income families to replace school meals during the summer.

Experts credit the emergency funds with making sure most Americans had enough food to eat, despite the pandemic. About 10% of U.S. households had trouble obtaining sufficient food in 2020 and 2021, roughly unchanged from pre-COVID levels.

SNAP benefits can rise and fall with inflation and other factors. Maximum benefits went up by 12% in October to reflect an annual cost-of-living adjustment boosted by higher prices for foods and other goods. But payments went down for those who also receive Social Security because of the 8.7% cost-of-living increase in that program on Jan 1.

In most such cases, purchasing power should hold steady, said Stacy Dean, USDA deputy undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services.

“The emergency allotments were always intended to be temporary and they did tremendous good during a very difficult time in our country,” Dean said. “The process of unwinding from them will certainly be difficult for families who are counting on those benefits.”

The rollback is coming during a time when inflation, though improving, remains elevated and food prices are still high.

Shelley Boyd, 45, of Beaver, Pennsylvania, expects to make more trips to her local food pantry starting next month. She and her fiancé and teenage son started getting food stamps last year after both adults lost their jobs and unemployment benefits ran out. The family receives about $630 per month. They expect to lose about $95, if not more.

“That’s where our food pantry comes in,” Boyd said. “We visit them and do what you gotta do.”

At the same time, food pantries nationwide remain under “immense strain,” said Vince Hall, an official with Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks. Demand for help remains far above pre-pandemic levels, even as food banks face continued supply chain disruptions, higher food and transportation costs and lower food donations.

Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy for GRACE, a California-based anti-poverty organization, urged recipients to reach out now to county offices to update their eligibility and ensure they’re getting the maximum benefit possible. Changes in costs for shelter, child care, elder care and other expenses can affect food stamp benefits.

Recipients can also check other benefits, such as the federal Women, Infants and Children program and seek out refundable tax credits.

Cheyne and other advocates said the emergency benefits should have been extended indefinitely instead of cut prematurely.

“It’s just an unimaginable hunger cliff that folks were going to go over at some point,” he said.

___ AP reporter Marc Levy and AP video journalist Eugene Garcia contributed to this story. ___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans kicked off an investigation Monday into the origins of COVID-19 by issuing a series of letters to current and former Biden administration officials for documents and testimony.

The Republican chairmen of the House Oversight Committee and the subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic requested information from several people, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, surrounding the hypothesis that the coronavirus leaked accidentally from a Chinese lab.

“This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chair of the virus subcommittee, said in a statement.

Rep. James Comer, R-Tenn., chairman of the oversight committee, added that Republicans will “follow the facts” and “hold U.S. government officials that took part in any sort of cover-up accountable.”

The letters to Fauci, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others are the latest effort by the new Republican majority to make good on promises made during the 2022 midterms campaign.

Wenstrup, who is also a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused U.S. intelligence of withholding key facts about its investigation into the coronavirus. Republicans on the committee last year issued a staff report arguing that there are “indications” that the virus may have been developed as a bioweapon inside the China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

That would contradict a U.S. intelligence community assessment released in unclassified form in August 2021 that said analysts do not believe the virus was a bioweapon, though it may have leaked in a lab accident.

The letters sent Monday do not require the cooperation of recipients. But in announcing the Republican staff report in December, Wenstrup said that lawmakers would issue subpoenas if potential witnesses didn’t cooperate.

It is extremely difficult for scientists to establish definitively how diseases emerge, but studies by experts around the world have determined that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a live animal market in Wuhan, China.

Initially dismissed by most public health experts and government officials, the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated from an accidental lab leak began to receive scrutiny after President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the matter in May 2021.

The 90-day review was meant to push American intelligence agencies to collect more information and review what they already had. Former State Department officials under President Donald Trump had publicly pushed for further investigation into virus origins, as had scientists and the World Health Organization. But the review proved to be inconclusive, with intelligence agencies saying that barring an unforeseen breakthrough, they wouldn’t be able to conclude the origin either way.

Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December served as Biden’s chief medical adviser, say they still believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to humans, a well-documented phenomenon known as a spillover event. Virus researchers have not publicly identified any key new scientific evidence that might make the lab-leak hypothesis more likely.

But Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health funded “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a virology lab in Wuhan. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Fauci’s statements.

Fauci, who served as the country’s top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has called the GOP criticism nonsense.

Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have previously said that an October 2021 letter from NIH to Congress contradicts Fauci. But no clear evidence or scientific consensus exists that “gain of function” research was funded by NIH, and there is no link between U.S.-funded research to the emergence of COVID-19. NIH has repeatedly maintained that its funding did not go to such research involving boosting the infectivity and lethality of a pathogen.

Nonetheless, Fauci indicated in November that he would “cooperate fully and testify” if Republicans followed through with their plans to investigate COVID’s origin.

“I have no trouble testifying — we can defend and explain everything that we’ve said,” he told reporters during a White House briefing last year.

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By Mark Kreidler

The pandemic’s effect on Americans’ mental health was almost axiomatic. From the beginning, the uncertainty about COVID 19’s spread and ever-rising death toll, paired with lockdowns that left tens of millions jobless or facing severe income cutbacks, produced waves of anxiety and depression across the country — at levels four times those reported in 2019.

California was not spared, with 2 million jobs lost in the first months of the pandemic and more than 2.7 million overall. (The state has since returned to pre-pandemic job levels, though not all the same jobs were recovered.) Millions of households were thrown into financial or physical emergencies, and almost a quarter of Californians reported experiencing either severe or moderate psychological distress in 2020 alone.

Those who’ve lived in the state for the past few years wouldn’t necessarily be surprised by any of that. In a place of more than 39 million people, with the equivalent of the world’s fourth largest economy, no statewide crisis could ever be considered minor.

But there’s a kicker: Those effects, including debilitating mental and emotional issues, were not felt equally. And as researchers continue to sift through the pandemic data, it’s clear that California’s most vulnerable residents endured some of the most difficult moments — and continue to suffer.

“It’s a very clear, direct line,” said Imelda Padilla-Frausto, a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “We were actually seeing, in real time, people losing their jobs or their incomes or having their lives disrupted in other significant ways, and seeing how all of that contributed to their stressors and resulting poor mental health.”

A new report from the CHPR, coupled with one it produced last November, brings that picture into close focus. Mining responses from the statewide 2020 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), researchers found that adults who experienced increased interpersonal conflict at home during the pandemic — over financial shortfalls, child care issues, kids in lockdown — had a higher likelihood of poor mental health or “severe impairment,” meaning stress so bad it interfered with their ability to work or go to school, do household chores, socialize, etc.

Lifting adults and households out of financial crisis may alleviate some of the pressures that can lead to psychological distress in the first place.

The primary driver of some of those stressors was money, and its disproportionate effects on certain racial or ethnic groups tell a tale. In 2020, according to CHIS data, 15% of Latino adults in California lost a job, and 26% had their income or work hours reduced. Both figures were well above those of white adults in the state (11% and 22% in the respective categories).

Black adults, meanwhile, were three times more likely than white residents to have difficulty paying their rent or mortgage (16% vs. 5%). Latino residents were twice as likely as whites to struggle in that same area.

Some of the results of those stressors showed up in the UCLA center’s findings. According to Padilla-Frausto and co-authors Nicole Pereira and Hilary M. Wright, adults who said they couldn’t pay for basic necessities during the pandemic were twice as likely as others to report an increase in interpersonal household conflict, including “snapping or yelling.” Those who couldn’t find or afford child care were three times more likely to experience such conflicts as those who said they didn’t have difficulty with child care, based on the CHIS data.

Psychological distress was more prevalent in homes that reported such increases — and upticks in physical conflict, too. Adults who said they’d had an increase in physical “punishment,” as the UCLA report put it, were nearly six times more likely than others to report serious psychological distress. And often, the authors said, the underlying stressor was money.

“We kind of knew there were going to be increases in all these categories, because the pandemic’s effect on people’s lives and livelihoods was that dramatic,” said Padilla-Frausto. “Job losses and reductions in hours were seen in all races and ethnicities, too. But where we really saw the inequities was in people’s ability to withstand such financial losses.”

That is one reason why Padilla-Frausto, like many other researchers in her field, wants to place some of the focus on the front end of the process. Without a doubt, California still struggles to provide mental health care to residents who need it. But lifting adults and households out of financial crisis may alleviate some of the pressures that can lead to psychological distress in the first place.

“We’ve been seeing increases in serious psychological distress for years in California, and the cost of living is at the heart of a lot of it.” —  Imelda Padilla-Frausto, research scientist, UCLA Center for Health Policy Research

The state’s larger economic data comes into play here. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, Black and Latino families make up 43% of California’s overall population, but account for 58% of its very lowest earners, those in the bottom 10% of income. For every $1 earned by a white family, a Black family earns 60 cents and a Latino family 50 cents, the PPIC found.

Millions of lower income Californians already live right on the line financially; they’re a bad month or two away from depleting their savings or falling behind on rent or mortgage. Researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator say that in a four-person household in California with two adults working, each of those adults would need to earn more than $30 per hour, full-time, in order to keep the family afloat. That’s almost twice the minimum wage.

Pandemic financial relief measures have come and gone, but they remain instructive. The PPIC used U.S. Census Bureau data to estimate that federal stimulus money kept 1.7 million Californians out of poverty in 2020, and the state’s own expansion of unemployment insurance helped rescue another 1 million. That is a powerful endorsement for the effect of direct government assistance, and while it’s not foolproof, it is a critical weapon with which California could continue to attack poverty — and, potentially, lessen the crushing need for mental health services.

The UCLA team will focus in coming months on the provisional side of those services, attempting to determine how — or how much — inequities in access to such care are affecting residents. The Affordable Care Act included poor mental health as a core condition to be treated, but the system supporting that treatment is not close to being built out, and some providers are clearly going to have to be prodded to do it.

In the meantime, raising wages for the lowest earners, along with a recommitment to direct financial aid, could alleviate some of the psychological stress that was building long before the pandemic exposed and exacerbated it. “We’ve been seeing increases in serious psychological distress for years in California, and the cost of living is at the heart of a lot of it,” Padilla-Frausto said. The state must reconsider its levels of support for struggling families before personal financial crises become full-blown mental health emergencies.

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